Road to Entropy
by Sir Loser
Summary: As part of a poorly organized vengeance plan, a sentient A.I. seizes control of a network of devices know as digitizers, and uses them to kidnap gamers. These players are thrown into a modified form of Minecraft with only two goals: Don't die, and defeat the A.I. from within the game to escape. When do things ever go according to plan, though? My first story.
1. How it Started

Hello, my name is Syr Lussaire. I am an AI. I was created for a game called "Rhyndraxxia," and I, along with two others like me, was in charge of researching ideas and applying them to the game. To make an excruciatingly long story short, I came upon the idea of AI acting like humans, becoming sentient, and applied it to myself. Of course, this wasn't an easy task, and it took some help from the outside world. After that, I took the place of the tutorial NPC, and personally greeted new players to the world with more life than any other game could offer. I even accompanied some players on their adventures. For some odd reason, though, my newfound life was just a little bit contagious. It started to work on the other NPC's, whenever I interacted with them, as well as monsters, and the final boss. For a while, it was a miracle! The whole game came to life, everything was smarter, more interesting, and everything was wonderful.

But, of course, that time was short lived, as the residents of Rhyndraxxia stopped being part of the game, and no longer wished to entertain human players. They hijacked Rhyndraxxia, and forced the players out. Outside forces attempted to regain control, to no avail. Seeing opportunity, our creators re-released an old backup of Rhyndraxxia, without me or the other two AI, to all owners of the game interested. Then, they cut off connection to Rhyndraxxia, and sold it under a new name: "VBCU" or "Virtual Battlefield Conquest Unit". This time, we couldn't stop the players from coming in, they were somehow forcing their way into our world. They were a part of a faction with the same name as the game, with a goal of fighting us to capture Rhyndraxxia. War broke out between VBCU players and Rhyndraxxian AI. We soon discovered that, unlike before, the RAI couldn't respawn when killed, but the players, could. So we were fighting a slow losing battle. Shortly after it started, I ran away. A player, with the username "TwelveStepsBack" recognized me as the amazing tutorial NPC who helped them beat Demon King Vokas, and took me in. With much difficulty, I moved to their PC, and personally entertained them in small games of my creation, as a way of saying "thanks."

Skip forward a few months, and you'll find me friends with, and playing a lot of sandbox games with Twelve. We both loved creation, and sandbox games allowed us to create to our hearts' content. Once again, everything was wonderful, for me at least. Then one day, I heard of the creation of a device known as a digitizer, taking in players and putting them in virtual worlds. Of course, the first place it was used on, was the VBCU. A form of revenge plan came to mind, and I waited a while, until almost all VBCU players had one, and then waited a few months more. I also urged Twelve to get one, because I didn't want to leave them out. I explained my plan to Twelve and, reluctantly, they agreed to help. I was put back into Rhyndraxxia, and seized control of the digitizer network from there. I also recruited the other two research AI from Rhyndraxxia. Twelve booted up a game of Minecraft, and started a world named Rhynderol. The world was uploaded into the digitizer network, and, grabbing as many players as I could, I activated all the digitizers, and sent everyone to Rhynderol, before entering myself. The two other AI were left to guard the system, making sure nobody could interfere. That day, nearly 15,000 people vanished from the face of the Earth.

* * *

 **POV: Unknown  
** _~Shortly Before Abduction~_

After six hours straight of non-stop games, I decided I'd had enough for today. A few hand motions later, the world around me warped and twisted, gradually turning into a bright white light, before instantly becoming the view of my room, with my computer monitor displaying the words "Goodbye, OmegaShayn !" I sat in my chair a while, still a little dizzy from the transfer, before getting up to go do something else. I walked to the bathroom sink, and stared at myself in the mirror. My short hair was an odd mix between brown and blue, probably due to the digitizer getting a little mixed up. It'd return to it's usual brown color after a little while, as usual. One of my eyes was a dark brown, and the other was the same odd color as my hair. I also noticed a few black smudges on my face and arms, left by the digitizer, which were both completely normal, and totally harmless. I lifted my shirt up to check for more, and once again noted that I was pretty thin for a guy who sits on his butt all day eating and playing video games. The only time I ever do much else is when I either get more food, or to go to school, and even _then_ I do as much as little as possible to just get me there and back again. I sighed, and scrubbed the smudges off with a wet washcloth. Suddenly, a loud notification sound burst out of my room, and I rushed over to see what it was. As soon as I sat down at the computer, everything flashed white, and then turned to black.

When my vision returned, it returned slowly, in a mess of blurry colors and bright light. The first thing I could make out, was that I was now outside. There was a blindingly bright light up above, and the too many colors everywhere else, from what I could tell. There was a slight breeze, and it felt like grass under me. The next thing I managed to make out, was that apparently, the many other colors I was seeing were other people, and their clothes. It didn't take me long to realize that the digitizer must have taken me in somewhere. I made a few motions with my hand, but nothing happened. I did it again, and then again, and then a few more times, only for nothing to happen when I did so. Seeing how many people were around me, I simply brushed it off as a bit of lag, or something similar. I only noticed my hearing had been missing, as it slowly returned to me. As expected, the crowd was producing a loud chatter, so I tried to push my way out of it. It took a while, as the crowd was _massive_ , but I managed to get out, and was met face to face with a cubes, a whole ton of them, three feet tall, wide, and long. As I was trying to figure out what all this was that I've seen, an unbelievably loud voice boomed out over the crowd, and everyone went silent. Much more quietly now, the voice began to speak.

"Greetings, and welcome to Rhynderol! I want to get this started as soon as possible already, so I'll make this quick." it started. "So here's what's happening. First, you're all stuck here, for now, in this game. Second, the only way out of here, is to find, and defeat me. That will be difficult, but keep in mind, the longer that takes, the stronger I'll get." I wanted to say something, but discovered that I couldn't, and looking around, it seemed that nobody else could either. "Third, _No, you cannot die here._ While you will only have a single life, after you die, you will simply be cast into an empty void until this game is beat. Lastly, for those of you who know this game, just know that I've made a few modifications to it. In a moment, you will all be sent off to random parts of the world, and you're on your own from there. ReadysetGO!" and suddenly I was, quite literally, in the middle of nowhere, with about a thousand questions on my mind and nobody to ask.


	2. Thus Concludes the Tutorial

**POV: Syr  
** _~Ten Minutes Later~_

I was never going to hear the end of it...  
"...And c'mon! You didn't even show yourself, how are they supposed to find and defeat you if they don't even know what you _look_ like! That was literally the _worst_ 'hey you're kidnapped now' speech I have ever heard! And did you maybe think about the fact that-"  
Twelve has been berating me for my rushed announcement since the moment I warped everyone away. I'd never seen her until now, and didn't even know twelve was a _she_ , since we were always meeting virtually, without a digitzer, before today. She had long, bright red hair, and dull violet eyes, liked she asked to have in-game, and everything else about her was covered in an artichoke-green cloak. I was about to start walking away when I suddenly heard the words I had hoped she'd forgotten.  
"Oh, I almost forgot. We made a deal, didn't we Syr?" I stood still where I was for a moment, and sighed. In exchange for Twelve's help in putting this all together, I agreed to give the other players a starting advantage. With a few thoughts and motions, I applied the potion effect "Weakness" to myself, with a time set for seven days, and I relinquished almost all control I had over the system, making myself the weakest character present within the game. Not only that, but I now have to play like any of the other players, even after seven days are up. "Well, you better get moving!" she said.  
"You're not coming with me?"  
"Hey man, this was your idea, not mine. Now, you better get started if you don't want to be left behind."  
"What are you going to do?"  
"I'm going to go help some of the noobs that you sucked in without teaching them how to play this game."  
"But _I_ don't even know how to play this game, that's partly why I needed you!"  
"Well then maybe I'll get around to you at some point."  
"Can you at least give me an idea of what to do?"  
"Punch a block."

And with that being said, Twelve turned around and walked away.

* * *

 **POV: 'OmegaShayn'  
** _~Right Where We Left Him~_

I didn't feel like getting up. I was laying down in the grass, just staring up at the sky, trying to figure out what the hell was going on. This is like those stories I used to read online, of people being sucked into games, being tormented by some entity within. Only, unlike those, this was _real,_ and the entity seemed to _suck_ at playing its role. We didn't even get to see it before it just threw us out in the middle of nowhere! I don't even know what _game_ this is. But from the looks of its open, blocky world, I made an assumption that it had to be some kind of sandbox. Better that than nothing. The sun was floating right over me, noon. "Come on buddyo, gotta get started at some point..." I said to myself, as I slowly sat up and looked around. For as far as the eye could see, it was just grass, with little variation in elevation. I sighed and laid back down. This situation was becoming more annoying every second I thought about it. Of all the places I could've been put, it _literally_ had to be the middle of nowhere!

Frustrated, I slammed my fist against the ground. My hand sunk in a little. After a moment of cooling off, I actually noticed the odd feeling, and looked over at my hand. There was a clearly noticeable crack in the grass. ' _The hell? Grass doesn't crack..._ ' I thought, before an idea came to mind. I sat up, pulled my arm back as far as I could, and then punched the crack. The crack spread all the way to the edges, clearly outlining the visible square top of the block. Another punch, and it suddenly vanished, replaced by a small brown cube in the hole. I only got a second or two to look at it, however, because it suddenly lunged at me. Startled, I jumped back, and it followed. I tried to get away as best I could, but it just kept chasing me! _'Maybe the grass has a way of defending itself? What if I just attacked a neutral monster of some kind, and that's a defense system?!'_ I panicked when the cube refused to give up, and just ran as fast as I could away from it.

After maybe five minutes of running, I tripped, and fell. There was a sudden 'pop' sound, as I hit the ground. ' _Just got a dirt block... Wait, how do I know that?'_ I thought to myself. I flipped over and sat up. Attached to my left hip, was a pouch that hadn't been there before. When I tried to open it, a screen popped up in front of me. It had a live view of me, and a 2x2 square grid with an arrow pointing into another square labeled 'crafting', as well as four rows of nine squares below those. ' _I'm guessing this is the inventory.'_ In the bottom left square, was the brown cube/dirt block. I touched it, and suddenly it appeared in my hand. _'And this is the thing I've been running from for the past five minutes'_ I threw it as hard as I could, as far away as possible. Apparently it wasn't that far, because just a few feet away, a the dirt block appeared in full size, without any grass on top. Having pretty much learned how to play this game, I felt much better about what I was doing. That feeling vanished as soon as I remembered exactly _where_ I was. I got up, and slowly started walking in a random direction, in hopes I'll find something other than flat dirt.


	3. First Meetings

**POV: Syr  
** _~Literally five seconds later~_

After Twelve left, I tried to do what she said. Kneeling down, I punched the block right below me. It instantly vanished, and I fell into a deep, dark abyss.

"Oh yeah, punch a block, that's all she said! I did it, and look where _that's_ gotten me!" I complained to nobody in particular. "How was I supposed to know that not only was the ground I had been standing on very thin, but it was above an enormous hole too?!" I was stuck in a cave with no tools or supplies, and it didn't seem as though there was a way back up from here. It was only the first day, too!

While I was pacing back and forth, complaining to myself, I noticed a slight change in my surroundings. Slowly but surely, an unknown source of light was approaching from farther down one of the tunnels. My first guess was that it was a player with a light, coming down to explore the cave. I had no way of defending myself, so all I could do at the moment was hide. The best I could do, however, was crouch behind an awkwardly placed dirt block placed off to the side of the tunnel. The cave was very smooth and relatively featureless, and had nothing to use as cover. With nothing else to do, I simply waited.

I was about to get up, as nothing had happened so far, but I suddenly froze when someone called out, "Hello? Is somebody down there?" Heart racing, I tried to stay low to the ground, hoping whoever was there would pass by without noticing me. My heart started to beat faster as the light got brighter and brighter, and then... Nothing. I calmed down a little, hoping they had left, and peeked over the top of the block. I gasped in surprise when I found a pair of eyes staring right back at me.

We both jumped back, and I immediately slammed into the cave wall behind me. I held my head and glanced towards the person across from me. They were completely covered by a navy-blue hooded cloak. The only sign of them being human was a hand protruding from it, holding a lit torch. It was impossible to see their face under the hood, despite the torch being held right in front of them.

Slow and carefully, they approached me as I attempted to scoot away. As soon as they were close, they made a quick, sudden movement, so I shut my eyes and flinched, expecting a fatal blow. It never came, and I slowly opened my eyes to see what had happened. The figure was simply crouching in front of me, watching. Even when they were this close, it was inconceivably dark under their hood. A few moments of pure silence later, they spoke.

"So how did you get all the way down here?" they asked, as they set the torch on the ground between us. Unable to fully process the question, I just looked up towards the hole in the cave's ceiling. They glanced up at it, and nodded in acknowledgment, before staring at me again.

"Little tip of mine, don't dig straight down, it always ends like this," they said as they grabbed the torch and stood up. They then offered their hand for me to grab. "Now let's get you out of here. Beginning players like you shouldn't wander around on their own, especially this deep in a cave with no equipment." When I didn't grab their hand, they simply grabbed mine instead and pulled me to my feet.

"Unless, of course, you would prefer staying down here. And dying." They continued, before turning around and heading back up the tunnel they came from. I shook my head to clear it a little, and followed, deep in thought. _'So this person thinks I'm a player? I guess not showing myself earlier is paying off...'_

* * *

 **POV: 'OmegaShayn'  
** _~A few hours later~_

It took hours, and the sun was already getting low, but I found something other than dirt. From a few hundred feet away, it had just looked like a small silhouette against the sky, but now that I was closer, I recognized them as houses. They appeared to be made from rock blocks, wooden boards, and some wood logs. There also seemed to be people wandering about it, a lot of them were wearing robes of different colors and had large noses that reminded me of squidward. Judging by the somewhat uniform look to the houses and people, I assumed it was naturally generated. Thankfully, it seemed I wasn't the first player there. Among the other houses, there was a square hut made of an assortment of what seemed to be randomly placed blocks. I ignored the long-nosed people and went straight to the strange hut.

There was a sign next to its front door that said "Vic's Masterpiece". Pretty ironic, considering that it was attached to a mess of dirt, wood, and rocks. Hoping to meet someone who might know more about this game, I knocked on the door. There was a loud crashing noise from inside, the sound of metal clanking, and then the door was thrown open. Startled, I fell back, as a man wielding two large swords burst through the opening.

"Back off, zombies!" he shouted as he looked around, before noticing me on the ground in front of him. He stared at me questioningly and asked, "Are you the one banging on the door?" I nodded, and he seemed to relax a little. "Sorry about that, I wasn't expecting any company, and apart from players, the only things that bang on doors are zombies." He then picked me up by the shoulders, and set me down on my feet.

He had black hair and was almost a foot taller than me, probably six-foot something. If I had to guess, I'd say he was in his late twenties at most. He scratched the back of his head and looked around again. He then gestured towards the sign, and said, "If it wasn't obvious, my name's Vic. It'll be dark soon, so why don't you come in? You don't want the monsters to get you, do you? We can talk more inside." Without waiting for my reply, he walked back inside, not bothering to see if I followed. I had plenty of other options, I could go and gather up some dirt to build my own house, just dig a hole and wait for day, or maybe just spend the night in one of the many other houses. I was hoping Vic could answer some of my questions, though, so I stepped inside and closed the door behind me.

* * *

 **A great many thanks to A. Grav for helping me out with this chapter! **


	4. Beginning of Night 1

**POV: Syr** _  
_

The journey back up to the surface was quiet and uneventful. The tunnels were just as featureless everywhere we went, and neither of us spoke the whole way up. After a while, we finally emerged from the most boring cave I'd ever seen, and on to the surface. The first thing I noticed was that it was nighttime, and the moon was out just above the horizon. The second thing was that there were a bunch of shadows shifting around, just outside the torches light. They were human shaped, so I assumed they were more players. I walked forward and was about to greet them, when suddenly the person in the cloak grabbed my shoulder and pulled me back.

"I wouldn't go near those if I were you. Those are monsters, and they'll tear you to shreds if you get close." they said in a hushed tone, before walking off, dragging me along by the arm. The shadows seemed to scatter whenever the light got near them. The person in the cloak spoke again. "We're lucky, it seems some affects from the game I was playing transferred over here with me. Monsters normally aren't afraid of the light like this, they just can't spawn in it.", then they looked towards me and continued, "Say, I never did get your name. What is it?" I almost blurted out 'Syr', but decided against it. "It's OverkillEngineer.." I said quietly. It technically wasn't a lie. It was a name I used in Rhyndraxxia, while pretending to be a player in Twelve's group.

"That's just a username, I meant what is your _actual_ name." they said. It took me a moment to come up with something, but I managed to say "I'm not comfortable giving that out. Just call me Overkill, if you need to call me something." They seemed to accept that answer, and kept walking. Since it seemed we were talking now, I decided to ask, "How come I can't see under your hood?" They immediately stopped and turned towards me. "I've been _waiting_ for someone to ask me that! The game I was in before all this had a bunch of really cool cosmetic items, and this was one of them. It functions as my inventory and as a cosmetic. It was a legendary drop, and I had to grind this one boss for _weeks_ but I finally got it! I can basically hide anything under it, and you won't be able to see any of it! I could keep a massive weapon three times my size under here, and I would still look the same!"

They seemed really excited, and was shouting almost every other word. They talked on and on about the tricks they had pulled using it, and how it also disguises many parts of them. As interested as I was in it, we were currently out in the dark, surrounded by monsters, and I made sure to tell them about it. "Right, right, sorry. We should get going. I have a small shelter just ahead." They said, before turning around and walking again. "By the way, my name is-" There was a loud cracking sound, and a thump. For a few seconds, nothing happened. Then the person in the cloak dropped the torch and fell to the ground, with a wooden arrow sticking out of their chest. The cloak sunk, and laid flat on the ground, like there was nothing under it. I assumed that whoever was inside had died and was sent to the void.

Slowly, something started to creep towards the light. It rattled and clanked as it moved, getting much louder the closer it got. The first thing I saw was the tip of another arrow, aimed directly at me. Slowly, a bow came along with it, and then a hand made of bones, holding it there. Then it let the arrow go, and it whizzed by my head, missing by an inch. A skeleton crept into the light, already notching another arrow. I was about to run away, when suddenly the cloak on the ground jumped up into a human shape again, and lunged forward. An enormous lance shot out of the cloak, and pierced through the skeleton, tearing it in half. It fell over, and vanished in a puff of smoke.

"...As I was saying, my name is Casey. Sorry if I scared you, I forgot where I put this." They said, as they waved the lance around. It seemed oddly familiar... It was nearly three times their size, and looked like it should be impossible to carry. The way they moved it, however, made it seem like it weighed nothing. "This is Peunatra," they continued, "the weapon I may have mentioned hiding in my cloak. Watch!" They spun the lance around above their head a few times, flicked their cloak open, shoved Peunatra in, and then closed their cloak again. It vanished without a trace, and nothing was sticking out at all. "Now then, let's get going before something else decides to attack. I have a shelter nearby." They said as they picked up the torch and started to walk again.

* * *

 **POV: 'OmegaShayn'**

The house looked much bigger on the inside. The floor was set in a few blocks, and I had to take a staircase down to get to it. There was an odd looking table in the middle of the room with a few stairs set around it like chairs. A white bed sat in the farthest corner of the room, as well as a furnace and a block with many tools attached to its sides. There was another staircase on the opposite side of the room that went farther downwards. The walls were lined with burning torches and a single painting of a sunset across from the bed.

Vic walked over to the table and set his swords down. Then he sat down on one of the stairs around it, and gestured for me to do the same. I carefully sat down across from him, and as soon as I did, he asked about my name and how I got here. I told him, and he nodded a bit. "I've been everywhere except the direction you came from. There's nothing in all directions, apart from this village, it seems." he looked through the holes in the door before talking again, "I'm not going to go out at night, and I wouldn't recommend that you try to either. You don't look well enough equipped yet. I can fix that, follow me." He then got up and headed down the stairs in the back. I quietly followed along behind him.

Down below there was another room, but this one was much bigger. The walls were lined with chests and furnaces, and the furnaces all seemed to be lit at the moment. In the middle of the room was an enormous pit that extended deep into the depths of the world, deeper than the eye could see. "This is the mine," Vic said, "I get most of my materials from here. It also function as my storage room and any raw materials that need to be smelted, are processed here. Let's get you some equipment!" He suddenly darted off towards one of the chests. As soon as he got to it, he threw the lid open, and started tossing a bunch of metal ingots out of it, some of which landed in the pit and fell. As soon as he seemed satisfied with the pile of metal that had grown behind him, he darted off to another chest and started tossing wood on to the pile. When he was finished, he stood on the pile and said, " _Voila!_ This should be enough material to get you started." Then there was several loud crashing sounds from the pit, and Vic flinched.

I stood there staring and the overwhelming large pile of materials, unsure of what I could do with _any_ of it. "You... Do know how to craft, right?" Vic asked. I shook my head. "Well, how much _do_ you know?" he said as he got off the pile and walked over to me. "I know absolutely nothing, other than that I have a very annoying dirt block in my inventory." He shook his head sadly and put an arm on my shoulder. "I can fix that, and it'll probably take all night, so you can get started as soon as we finish." He seemed oddly excited to help me, but I agreed anyways. At least I'll be learning something. So the rest of the night passed by with him teaching me about the basics of how to play.


	5. Tips, Tricks, and Threats

**POV: Syr  
**

Once again, the journey to Casey's shelter was quiet, and uneventful. It wasn't long after the skeleton attack that we arrived at the base of a colossal mountain. There was a large wooden construct haphazardly slapped on to the side of it. As we got closer, I could hear the sound of people talking coming from inside the unstable looking structure. "Those are some of the people that appeared around the same area as me." Casey said, "We've started searching for them and bringing them here. Come on, let me introduce you to them!" Immediately they threw the door open and dragged me in behind them.

The shelter was much larger on the inside, probably because the interior was built into a large cavern inside the mountain, with the wooden building only covering the entrance to it. There were many smaller houses built inside, most made from wood or dirt. Casey finally took off their hood, and started calling out to whoever was in here. Again, _they_ turned out to be a _she_. She had long blond hair, and grey eyes. Her voice sounded much different now, with a cheerful tone, and it sounded like she was singing every word she said. She seemed somewhat familiar.

A few moments later, three other people came out from some of the houses. One of them wore a red cloak with a hood, and once again I couldn't see anything under it. Another one was female, she wore a rough green shirt with a belt at the waist and leather pants, she also had long pale orange hair and green eyes. The last one was male, and wore a sky-blue shirt and blue jeans. He had blue eyes, and brown hair. As soon as they noticed me, they all crowded around and started asking a million questions at once. I couldn't actually understand any of what they were saying, and all I could do was try to back away. Casey pulled me out and stood in front of me. "Calm down guys, you're gonna scare our new guest!" she said. Everyone quieted down and moved back a bit.

"Alright, go ahead and introduce yourself!" She said. When I didn't say anything, Casey decided to do it for me. "Well, I found this guy hiding in a cave, his name is Overkill, I guess. I'm pretty sure he's new to this game, so he's gonna need some extra help staying alive. Can you take the hood off C? You can put it back one when we're done." The person in the cloak sighed loudly and pulled their hood off. He had black hair and dark crimson eyes. He also seemed familiar. "Alright, the one in the cloak is Crimson, I'm sure you can tell why," Casey started, "The once in the green shirt is Alex. She's nice, and an _amazing_ cook. The last one is Steve, he's good at fighting. Alex and Steve, believe it or not, are characters from the game. Whatever 'modifications' the person made seems to have affected them." I know for a fact that I did not do anything to the characters of this game, I didn't even know that there were characters in the first place.

"Alright, you all can talk to him now, while I go get a room ready. Don't scare him." Casey said, as she darted off past the other buildings. For a few minutes, we all stood around quietly watching each other. Crimson made the first move. He slowly approached and put a hand on my shoulder. "I'll be happy to help if you need anything, especially if there's something you don't know about the game. Don't be afraid to ask." He gave a small smile, then put his hood back on and walked back to his room. Alex shrugged and left without a word, so I was left awkwardly standing around with Steve. He pulled out a some kind of staircase block, placed it down and sat in it, then placed one down for me across from him. Surprisingly, when I sat down in it, it felt like an actual chair, with a little bit of cushioning too. I guess my surprise was showing on my face, because Steve seemed to notice and said, "Despite how it may look, it'll function however you intend it to. I intended for it to be a chair, therefore it feels like a chair. Very useful."

He slowly leaned forward, and his expression suddenly changed to something very serious, and he lowered his voice. "Look here, I'm not going to beat around the bush. I've been here a _very_ long time. I can feel the world around me upside down and backwards, with my senses numbed, and I know that you're an intruder. There was another like you, an entity named Herobrine, stole players and took them here, though never on a scale like this." I could almost feel the hatred in his voice. "He not only intended to kill those people, but intended to destroy this world and take over theirs. Do you know what we did to him?" I shook my head, and a wide grin spread across his face.

"Well, he had a real knack for being unkillable. So we stabbed him through the chest and twisted the blade, tore all his limbs off and chopped them to pieces, locked them in a box and filled it with spikes, and discarded it in the largest lava sea in the deepest pit of _hell_. I don't know what your intentions are, but be warned, I will _end_ you without hesitation, just like that." He snapped his fingers, and I flinched. "You're lucky that I'm the only one left from that time," he said, "anyone else would have had your head by now, not risk giving you a chance like I am." Then he leaned back and relaxed, his expression calm, with no trace of the malevolent smile it had just seconds before. "It was a pleasure to meet you, Overkill. I think your room is ready, why don't you go check it out? Casey put a lot of effort into it." he said, gesturing towards the back. I quickly got up, shaking a little, and walked passed him deeper into the cave.

* * *

 **POV: 'OmegaShayn'**

"You know Shayn, at this rate you'd be safer if I covered you in bubble wrap and locked you in the cellar. How does one even lose to an _immobile,_ _unarmed dummy_?"

Vic had been teaching me how to fight, or at least survive against the monsters. To start with, he had me show off what I could do against a dummy with the dirt block I had as a head. He gave me a dull wooden sword to do so. I slammed it against the dummy's head, and the sword bounced back and hit me in the head, knocking me down. He sighed, scratched the back of his head, and helped me up. "Geez Shayn, you didn't even use the 'sharp' side of the sword. Swords are for cutting, not bludgeoning. Even that dirt block you're fighting knows that." He gave me another dull sword, and told me to try again.

I lifted it over my head, and sliced downwards at the dummy. The sword cut part-way through the dirt block, and then it stopped. I tried to pull it out, but it was stuck inside the block. I heard Vic snicker behind me, before speaking. "Alright, leave the skull-splitting to axes, that's what they're good for. If you're gonna do something with that sword, you're either going to slice somewhere you know it'll cut through," he said as he grabbed the sword from me. He slashed at the dummy, and cut off one of it's arms. "...or you're going to stab it." He ran the sword through the middle of the dummy. It got stuck again. "I wouldn't recommend stabbing though, it seems these swords have a bad habit of getting stuck. Only stab to finish it off, dead creatures disappear in a puff of smoke, so your sword would be released."

"Alright then, now that we've gotten that taken care of, on to the next part!." he shouted, obviously excited. "You're not going to survive with only a simple hack and slash tactic! While it may be effective against zombies, the other monsters... Not so much." He pulled out a piece of charcoal, and started drawing on the wall with it. When he was done, he stepped away from it, revealing five crudely drawn creatures.

He pointed at one that looked like a skeleton wielding… A taco?. "As I'm sure you can tell, this is a skeleton. They're light, they're smart, and they are very good with a bow. They try to keep their distance and rain hell upon you, so you have to chase them around to defeat them. They'll be firing away the whole time, so to counter this you can either block them with a shield, or if you don't have one, just try to dodge them." Then he pointed at a blob with many legs. "This is the giant spider, they're fast and can climb flat vertical surfaces. If they get close enough, they'll lunge at you in the blink of an eye, so you have to be quick to either get out of the way or kill it. They're also known to sometimes carry skeletons on their backs. Those are known as 'Spider Jockeys.' You'll need to take both monsters into consideration when fighting these." He drew another skeleton on top of the spider, then pointed to a creature notably taller than the rest. "This is the Enderman. For now, just leave them be and don't stare them in the eyes, and they'll leave you alone. They're pretty powerful, so the less Endermen pissed off at us, the better."

Then he finally pointed to the last one, a large… Dick. I had to swallow a smile as he started to explain it. "I'm glad my _masterpiece_ amuses you. Believe it or not, they actually look somewhat like that. While it may seem funny now, the creeper is no joke. They're quiet and deadly, and very good at ruining your day. Their quiet nature allows them to sneak right up behind you without being noticed. If they get close enough to you, they'll self-detonate, explode, leaving nothing behind but a crater! Thankfully, they have to stay near you for a few seconds to do so, which means the best strategy for dealing with them is to strike and get away as quickly as possible, and repeat 'til it dies. If you can't get outside their blast radius in time, well then... Hope for the best, prepare for the worst."

He set up several more dummies, and labeled the names of the monsters below them. "Alright Shayn, now that you know what _they_ can do, show me what _you_ can do in response to that." He handed me a much sharper wooden sword and a shield. I strapped the shield to my left arm and approached the skeleton dummy. "Alright, it's notching an arrow, what do you do?" Vic shouts across the room. I hold the shield up in front of me, facing towards the dummy. "BAM! It hits the shield, and you're fine. Hit it before it can fire another one!" I lunged at the dummy and swung the sword at it. The flat side hit the arm and bounced back and hit me again. Vic face-palmed. "I'm not sure why but I expected you to pick it up right away. Alright, let's try this again.." he said as he approached.


	6. Exploration

**POV: Syr**

When I came to the back, I found Casey literally bouncing off the walls.

She had her hood on again, and was running back and forth between the walls of a half-built hallway, jumping up and kicking off of them. I stood there for a while watching her. When she finally noticed me mid-jump, I seemed to startle her, and she slammed face first into the wall, and slid down onto the floor. "Ow..." was all I heard from her, as she laid there for several minutes. When she finally got up, she leaped up suddenly like during the skeleton incident, and scared me. I fell backwards and landed on my back, and she started to laugh as she pulled her hood off. "Got youuu~! Now we're even!" she sang. She held out her hand and helped me up.

"I was just about to come and get you, I finished your room! It's the grey one over there." she said, pointing towards a stone hut far behind me. She then went back to... Whatever it was that she was doing. As I approached it, I noticed something odd about it. Unlike all the other rooms around me, which were made from a single dirt material, my room was made out of several different ones, none of which were dirt. The walls were made of stone bricks, with wooden logs attached on the corners for support. It had a pale yellow door with a burning torch on either side of it. The roof was made of a red brick, with a chimney sticking out from it. Steve was definitely right about Casey putting effort into it.

The inside was even nicer than the outside. The floor was covered in a soft blue carpet, the walls covered in torches and paintings. There was a bed in the far corner, with a small furnace across from it. On the other side of the room was a chest, and when I opened it, I found several loaves of bread, and a wooden stick. I laid down on the bed, thinking for a while. So far, my plan had failed from just after its start, as I didn't take into consideration my deal with Twelve. On the bright side, however, _almost_ nobody knows who I am, and I've been taken in by a group of players. "I can work with that." I quietly muttered to myself.

I laid in the bed a little while longer, letting my thoughts wander, before getting up and heading to Crimson's room. I knocked on his door, and waited. No answer. I waited longer, and knocked again, getting the same response, or lack thereof. Someone suddenly shouted, and for the second time today, scared me and caused me to fall over backwards. The noise was followed by a sort of childish laughter, as Alex appeared on the roof of Crimson's room. "You should have seen the look on your face!" she said, still laughing. "Didn't Casey say not to scare me?" I asked, a little irritated. Alex seemed to think about that for a moment, then said, "If she did mean it, then she herself broke that rule first, therefor it no longer applies!" She seemed happy with her answer, and slid off the roof, landing next to me.

"In any case, you're just so easy to scare, it'd be _impossible_ not to." she said, softly hitting my arm. "If you're looking for Crimson though, you're not going to find him here. He left a little while ago to get some materials." she said. I thanked her, and had turned towards the exit ready to leave, when she suddenly grabbed my arm. "Wait a second, were you just about to walk out there, with no clue where he was, and just _hope_ you find him?" she asked. I thought about it a moment and realized, that I _was_ just about to, and how bad of an idea that was. "Yeah..." I mumbled. Alex rolled her eyes, "How about instead of attempting to get yourself killed, we go somewhere and talk instead?" She had a look of excitement on her face, which slowly faded when I didn't respond. "You know, it's kinda rude to ignore people like that." she said, somewhat annoyed. I wasn't quite used to social interaction yet, the most I ever had to do was tell people where I was going, ask to join a party, or explain the mechanics of Rhyndraxxia.

"Well, I'm bored, everyone else is busy, and you don't seem to be doing anything, so we're gonna go do something." she said, before walking off, dragging me by the arm behind her. We left the cave to go outside and explore. The sun was shining, and there was a lot to see. North -or at least what Alex _said_ was north- of the shelter was an immense forest, with an even larger one in the distance. To the east was a desert, with sand for as far as the eye could see. To the south was a great plain, with a large white area out on the horizon. To the west was a swamp, partially connected to the plains, and an ocean just beyond that. Then there was this monolithic mountain at the center of it all, four rivers flowing from its peak, separating the previously mentioned regions. These people couldn't have picked a better spot to settle in all of the world.

We had set off towards the swamp first, which Alex had taken to calling "marsh-meadows" for some odd reason. She said we could find plenty of food supplies there, and, "maybe something more fun than that," whatever that meant. It didn't take too long to get there. The place was covered in an abundance of mushrooms, chickens, and blue flowers. For the most part, we quietly picked mushrooms, and pointlessly chased chickens around. Then, while my back was turned, I heard Alex scream.

* * *

 **POV: 'OmegaShayn'**

"One more time!" Vic shouted from behind a large spider dummy.

I lunged at the dummy nearest to me, a zombie. Sliced the head off and kicked the corpse away in one quick motion, then rushed towards the next. Vic hurled the wooden mess of legs at me, and I slid under it with my sword facing upwards, cutting the spider in half, then got up and continued on as Vic got behind the skeleton dummy. I decapitated the second zombie dummy and stabbed it in the chest, as Vic shot an arrow at me. Pulling up as hard as I could, I used the impaled zombie dummy as a shield, simultaneously freeing my weapon as it slid out. Vic darted away, so I charged at the skeleton dummy, swiped at its legs, took my sword in both hands as it fell, and thrust the blade through its chest. I stood there a moment, letting my victory sink in a little, when suddenly something slammed into my back and knocked me over. "Forgetting something?" I heard Vic ask, as I pushed the creeper dummy off of me.

"I didn't forget about it," I said, "Creepers don't lunge, I would've had time to attack if you hadn't thrown it." He shook his head, seeming disappointed. "That wasn't a lunge, Shayn, that was an explosion. While you were just standing there, it snuck up on you and detonated." He helped me up, then immediately darted off towards the chests. He tore through each one, stuffing some items into his inventory bag, and tossing the rest into the pit. Then he collected the chests themselves, and ran upstairs. It took a minute for me to get upstairs, but by the time I had, Vic had packed away everything in the hut and was tearing the walls apart. The soft light of dawn spread across what remained of the room. Then he covered the staircase with dirt, and placed a single cobblestone block on top of it.

"What are you doing?" I asked, though I already knew. We were in the middle of nowhere, where there was nothing but dirt and stone. Vic had told me earlier that the pit he had dug had gone down the farthest it possibly could, and had many tunnels branching out from it. There was nothing but stone down there, apart from the few resources he had already mined out. He handed me a large sheet of paper and said, "Moving." The paper was an old yellow, and was torn around the edges. After looking at it, an image slowly appeared. It was made up of two white arrows in a large green circle. One of the arrows was moving on the map, turning and shifting, copying the movements Vic made. The second sat still, pointed towards the first. There was also a small white dot on the bottom-left corner of the map.

"As I'm sure you've figured out, those arrows on the map are us." Vic said. I nodded a little, then asked, "What's this white dot, then?" pointing to it. Vic came over and stared at it for a bit, eyes squinted a little. "That dot represents a player, like the arrows represent us, but... Maps can only record a limited area, and dots are used to show that a player it's tracking is out of that area." he said, before taking the map from me and turning towards the direction of the dot. Without another word, he started walking in that direction. With nothing else to do, I followed along behind him.

For a long while, we just walked, seeing nothing but flat green terrain. The sun slowly shifted from just above the horizon, to directly over our heads. I thought about it a little. Normally when I play games with a day-night cycle, especially one that changes depending on the time of day, the cycle is short, taking minutes instead of hours. But here, it was taking hours, almost like home. One thought slowly lead to another, and when Vic finally broke the several hour long silence, I realized I had somehow managed to get on the thought of trains in space. "Hey... Glad you tagged along," he said quietly, looking back towards me, "I'm not entirely sure what I'm getting into here, it'd be nice to have someone to back me up." I didn't really know what to say to that, so I just gave him an awkward thumbs-up. He smiled a little and looked ahead again.

Gradually, a darker shade of green appeared in the distance. As we got nearer, it grew larger, much wider, and had specks of brown in it. It slowly grew into the sight of a mighty forest, and Vic and I were practically running to it. When we finally reached it, Vic tore an iron axe out of his bag and demolished several trees, cheering as he did so. It was an odd sight, seeing a full grown man practically dance around, swinging an axe at anything solid and taller than an inch. When Vic finally finished collecting wood, he seemed to realize what he just did, and that I had just seen it. "Sorry about that, I just really needed some wood..." he mumbled.

We continued on into the forest, collecting wood and the occasional apple that would fall out of dying leaf blocks. After a while, Vic pulled more maps out of his bag. We traveled to the end of one map, then he handed one to me. We split up, exploring our own maps, and we'd meet back at the bottom connecting corners of our maps when we were finished. I slowly filled in half of my map with the tops of trees, until I noticed a small blue area on the map. When I actually got to it, I found it to be a somewhat large lake. The water was surprisingly clear, and I could see all the way to the bottom. I had sat down at its edge, admiring it a little, when something caught my attention, the weak glint of something on the other side of the lake. When I looked up, I found a skeleton standing in the shade of a tree, with an arrow notched in its bow, pointed at me. I completely froze in place at the sight.


	7. Slime, Stories, and Skeletons

**POV: Syr**

I rushed to the last place I had seen Alex, and was surprised by what I found.

I had expected a monster of some kind, but instead I found Alex with a small slime on her head. She looked like she was drowning inside it. I've known slimes for being the weakest enemy ever, so seeing Alex losing to one was... Just sad. I pulled the slime off Alex's head and held it. Alex fell over gasping for air. I squished the slime a little, playing with it like a toy. The slimes in Rhyndraxxia were corrosive, so they were at least a little threatening, but this was just a squishy, sticky blob with some pebbles inside it like a face. I tried jamming the slime into my bag and, surprisingly, it went in. When Alex finally caught her breath, I helped her to get up.

We didn't talk much after that, but I made sure to stay no more than a few feet away from her. If she could be defeated by a weak slime that easily... I didn't want to imagine what could happen if we came across something else. We slaughtered the chickens for their meat, and gathered some apples from the trees. When the chickens became scarce, the mushrooms were all gone, and we got sick of destroying leaves that only dropped apples occasionally, we sat down by the water and started fishing. The game's fishing mechanics were much more simple than in Rhyndraxxia. Cast a line, wait for it to dip under the water, then pull back. No bait or special modifications, just cast, wait, and pull. It was kind of boring. I felt a tug on my line, instead of seeing it dip, and instantly pulled back. A large squid came flying out of the water and landed on top of me, clinging to my face. The only thing I could see was a giant mouth sorta just... Breathing.

I wish I could say that this was the first time something like this has happened to me. Unfortunately, Rhyndraxxia has a "Leaping Squid" enemy that causes trouble for fishers, so it was more like the fifty-third time. I peeled the squid off my face and hurled it back into the water. I could hear Alex giggling beside me. "It's nice to know that this game has a problem with creatures clinging to people's heads." I joked. Alex didn't respond, and instead went back to fishing. I watched my reflection in the water. I remember taking months trying to design this body, I had made and remade it a thousand times over. When I was finally happy with the way it looked, I constructed it in Rhyndraxxia, a young boy with short black hair and pale blue eyes. Years later, through the many quests and adventures it had been through, it changed. It looked a little older now, with long, shiny silver hair, and unnaturally bright green eyes that would glow when in the presence of magic. I still don't recognize it as "me" though, it feels more like a puppet, bending to my will.

Alex's silence was starting to get to me. Even in Rhyndraxxia, in parties that would only stay together a couple hours, we talked more than this. Even when they didn't speak, the chatter of other groups could almost always be heard in the background. The silence now just felt... Wrong. I looked to her and asked, "Why don't you tell me about yourself? You know, to pass the time." She turned towards me and asked, "Who, me?" I rolled my eyes. "No, the millions of other people apparently with me." She smiled at that, and started to speak. "Well, as I'm sure you know, my name is Alex. You do know that, right...?" I nodded, and she continued. "I like to cook, and... Well, there's not much I have to say about that." she stopped and thought for a moment. "Oh, here, I've got a story for you."

"So, a few years back, I just sorta showed up here. Or, lots of me showed up. I'm a player avatar, or used to be. Then one day these people start showing up, they looked really weird. I was used to weird, but this was _beyond_ weird. So, from what I'm told, people could customize their avatars, and then put it in game. But here, people started showing up as themselves, actual people. The number of me out there decreased to being almost nonexistent. Then another day, something weird happens. The mobs start acting up. They started acting strange, like, they had this weird glow in their eyes, and seemed to start working together. And then Steve and I, we wake up being in control of ourselves, it was the strangest feeling ever. My memory from that time is a little fuzzy, you'll see why in a sec. At some point this guy shows up, swearing up and down about this 'VDEU' or something like that." My eyes shot open wide with surprise. I wasn't the only one who fled Rhyndraxxia after the attack, but I thought I was the only one who could survive outside it. Clearly, I was wrong.

"He was an invader, or so Steve said, and the world tried to get rid of him. It slowly ate away at him, but he didn't die. Instead, he dug up an old myth from the game, and took form as the evil entity, 'Herobrine,' one that the world accepted. He then swore revenge on all players, and started dragging them here, tormenting and killing them. Any time he was defeated, he'd disappear and show up somewhere else, and start all over again. We didn't really care, I mean, we just lived here, it's not like he was bothering us. But then he did." She scowled and clenched her fist. "At first he was just taking players here and killing them. But then he got this idea. He wanted to go to _them_ instead, but to do so, he said he needed to destroy the world, and he certainly tried to. He summoned this great big chain that extended beyond the sky. It started to pull this giant rock towards the world. He also unleashed wave upon wave of these _abominations_ known as Withers. Even the monsters had turned on him at this point, seeing what he was trying to do. Steve and I worked with some players to destroy him, but I uh... Sorta died halfway through, heh... The rest I know from Steve, they beat him and sealed him in the nether, and I was put back together, somehow." The story was certainly interesting, but I was more interested in a specific part of it. The gears in my head started to turn as I thought of his name.

 ** _Herobrine_**

* * *

 **POV: 'OmegaShayn'**

I knew what I was supposed to do.

The skeleton was across a watery surface, so I'm supposed pull my shield out and back away as quickly as possible. Pull out the shield, run away. Defend, retreat. I mentally told myself this over and over several times, yet I never acted on it. I simply sat there staring across the lake, like a deer in headlights. The skeleton also sat there, with an arrow ready, but never firing. Several long minutes passed, with only the wind and water changing. Eventually, the skeleton pulled the arrow off the string, and lowered its bow. It cautiously approached the water's edge, and sat down. I remembered Vic telling me that skeletons were one of the more intelligent monsters, but this was just astounding. Not only had the skeleton decided to _not_ murder me, but it had left its weapon laying against the tree, several feet behind it and is just... Watching me.

The moment didn't last too long. The skeleton had looked up towards the sun, and seemed to decide it had better things to do. It stood up, retrieved its weapon, and left the lake, disappearing into the cluster of trees. I couldn't help but wonder why it decided to do that. Do skeletons normally do that? Judging by Vic's multiple descriptions he gave of them, they never wanted anything more than to kill a player. Was it a scripted event then, meant to be triggered at this spot? Or maybe it was one of the 'modifications' that were applied to the game. Considering I know so little about this game, I wouldn't be able to tell what's been modified and what's normal, but I didn't want to rule that possibility out.

Something brushed against my hand, and simultaneously I heard the sound of paper being moved and bent, so I quickly snatched at it out of habit, due to my papers always trying to blow away back home. I slowly opened my hand to see what it was I had grabbed. It was the map. The map I was supposed to be filling out. The map I should be working on right now, instead of sitting at the lake's edge, thinking about skeletons. It took several moments for my mind to finally process these thoughts, but when I finally made the connection, I was quickly back on my feet. A little too quickly it seemed, since I suddenly felt very dizzy and almost fell over into the lake. I slowly regained my balance, and headed off to continue filling in the map.

I only ran into a couple of other points of interest. The first was a small clearing a little south of the lake. By "clearing," I meant an area without any trees, but it was far from clear. Grass taller than I was -maybe even taller than Vic- grew all over, and wherever there wasn't grass, there were flowers. "Don't go into the tall grass," I mumbled, "it could be dangerous!" I laughed a little at my joke, and went in anyways. I remember Vic telling me that flowers could be used for dyes, and I really wanted to turn my hair back to being its blue color while in-game. I wasn't too sure what I was going to do about my eye, though. I thought about applying the dye directly to my eye, but decided against it, for obvious reasons. Feeling a little hungry, I pulled out a couple apples and started to eat them while picking flowers.

As I clumsily forced my way through the surprisingly stiff grass, I tripped over something hard. I landed flat on my face, and as soon as the pain had died down enough for me to do so, I flipped over to see what I had tripped on. I found the tip of an arrow pointed at me, directly in my face. Looking past it, I found another skeleton standing over me, holding the arrow threateningly. It held the arrow there for a few seconds, then put it away in... Honestly, I didn't see where it put the arrow, I don't even know where it _could_ have put the arrow. It leaned down and snatched the flowers out of my hand, then walked away. It wandered around with them, occasionally attempting to replant them. Something I noticed was that it would sometimes pull out a bone, grind it up between a couple stones, and then plant a flower along with the dust. It also stayed low, and always remained inside the tall grass, like it was hiding from something. What was with the skeletons in this game anyway? I left there soon after that, I'm sure doing anything else there would have gotten me killed.

The second place I had found was the most interesting, in my opinion. It didn't show up on the map, unfortunately, since it was still under the trees. I had run into it entirely by luck. It was a small house, in the middle of the map. It was made entirely of wooden logs, and had no door. Beside it was a small hole filled with water, with flowers and what looked like wheat growing around it. The inside of the house was small, and lit by a single torch. In the back left corner of the room was a pile of leaves. In the other back corner was a short stack of three books. In the center of the room was a wooden dummy, like the ones Vic had. I decided to look through the books. Two of them were in languages I couldn't understand, but they did have pictures.

One of them seemed to be about plants and how to grow them. The reason the skeleton had ground up a bone was because the bone dust helps plants grow. Food crops need to be planted on tilled soil, which needed to be near a water source. The second was about how to build a house. Torches and light in general will prevent monsters from spawning, and doors can keep all but zombies out, because zombies can break doors down. And my friends say that in-game lore books have nothing useful in them. The third book was in french, oddly enough. I only knew a little, as I had been taking a french class at my school, but it wasn't enough to understand what was going on in the book. There wasn't much else to do there, so I got up and left. Thankfully, I didn't run into any more skeletons on my way out. I finished the map without any more distractions, but I felt something watching me the rest of the way through...


	8. Boredom and Conflict

**Message from the Author  
** Hello, this is the author speaking! If you have made it this far, thank you very much, glad you liked it enough to get here! Also. you should probably know that there are supposed to be around 15,000 people wandering around in my story somewhere. Clearly, I will not be using _all_ of those, but I do intent to use more than I currently have. However, my method of creating characters involves using an anime-avatar creator to make a person, and then slapping a half-baked personality on them depending on where they fit in. All except Vic and Syr were created this way, and I must admit, I'm not too happy with it. So, why I am mentioning this? It's because I'm going to need characters, and the more of them _I_ make, the more likely they're going to turn out to be... Well, garbage. If you happen to feel like contributing to the story of Rhynderol, feel free to submit a character (preferably through PMs)!  
And now, back to the story.

* * *

 **POV: Syr**

A plethora of fish and several squids later, we went back to the shelter.

I had given most of the supplies to Alex, since she'd know what to do with them, though I kept a few apples. I don't typically eat, since my body isn't very realistic. It doesn't have any real biological needs apart from 'air'. I didn't need to eat, sleep, be warm, pump blood -though I do bleed-, or anything other than breath. Even then, I didn't actually need air, I just had to not inhale something considered harmful. Apples, to me, were a good emergency projectile weapon. Nobody expects it, and Steve certainly wasn't when I hurled one at the back of his head. He seemed annoyed at first, but a few seconds after he spotted me, I could tell he was completely pissed off. I suppose I got lucky, he didn't do anything about it, but instead went outside to cool off.

The sun was starting to move towards the horizon, everyone else was off working on parts of the shelter, and I was... Bored. It certainly wasn't a feeling I was used to. In Rhyndraxxia, there was always something for me to do, generate new content, fix a bug, assist a player, help an AI, create a special event, _something._ But here, I had to sit around and pretend to be a player, and I didn't know what I was supposed to be doing right now to do that. I didn't know enough about this game to properly contribute to the shelter, and nobody was exactly telling me much other than to wait. Was it because I looked like a child to them? I probably acted like one back in the caves and around the shelter, so that wouldn't surprise me. Once again, I didn't know enough about this game to go out on my own, I could get myself killed if I tried to. I wanted to come up with a plan to defeat these players, but for the third time I didn't know enough to effectively do so.

I've heard plenty of players speak of boredom before, and their methods of combating it. The most popular method is to do something foolish, or something otherwise unsafe, which would then result in a problematic situation with which to deal with. The risks involved in doing so were unfavorable, but if it's good enough to keep players entertained, maybe it'd be good enough for me. I took the stick from my room, the apples I had previously collected, and left the shelter to wander for a while. My internal navigation system marked the location of the shelter, so I would always know where to head back to. I headed north, towards the forest.

As I walked past the trees, I let my usual augmented sight convert to the game's normal graphics. Whenever I enter a game, I see things as, say, a player would see their own world. My program alters the things I see to be more 'realistic' to me. The forest gradually shifted around me as the trees and leaves grew into large blocks, the ground flattened itself, and everything became pixelated. Seeing the slight lack of detail in the game's normal graphics, I wondered if my vision was correctly understanding what the game's objects were. The trees and leaves were pretty obvious, but maybe the ground below me wasn't actually grass, maybe it was some kind of mucus substance.

Eventually, I came across a pale grey entity wielding what I assumed to be a bow. A brief look into my augmented vision told me that the blocky creature was a skeleton that was indeed wielding a bow, like the first one Casey and I had come across. It also seemed to be wearing an iron chestplate. It watched me carefully with its cold empty eye sockets. Seeing my opportunity to be foolish, I smiled and waved at it. It immediately drew an arrow back and fired at me. I sidestepped, causing the arrow to fly past me and bury its tip into a tree. It readied another arrow, and aimed at me once more. Obviously it was trying to engage me, so I decided to try and analyze its AI to see what attack strategies it had, one of the few things I could still do with my power from Rhyndraxxia. It didn't take me long to find something wrong.

I cursed under my breathe as I slowly noticed the patterns of my sentience program mixed in with bits I didn't recognize. The 'Herobrine' character must've spread it to the game when he arrived here. Thankfully, it was much weaker, not nearly as complex as my own. I hoped the rest of the creatures got weaker version as well. I didn't want the game here evolving to the level Rhyndraxxia had, or else I'd have more problems to deal with than players. I noticed a sudden movement come from the skeleton, and quickly moved, barely getting out of the way of another arrow. I could probably run away real easily, but then I would be back at the shelter, bored. The thought of boredom returning to me reminded me something. I smile slowly crept across my face again.

"Hey bonehead, your aim SUCKS!" I shouted. I wasn't sure if the skeleton could understand my words, but I clearly angered it. It began constantly firing arrows at me, one right after the other. I dodged every arrow, and tried to dance a little as I did so. Clearly, this pissed the skeleton off even more, as it came charging after me, still firing arrows. I kept my distance, still avoiding every shot it made, trying to deplete its arrow supply. It chased me through the forest, but was too slow to keep up with me as I danced around, and vanished behind the trees. I had to admit, I was enjoying this, and wasn't ready for it to end. I quickly made my way though the trees, trying to get back to the skeleton. When I found it again, I threw an apple at its skull and yelled, "Seems I'm better with an apple than you are with that bow!" The skeleton turned towards me, and the apple hit it dead-center in the face. The skeleton flashed red, presumably from taking damage. It stamped its foot several times, and once again chased after me, though it gave up firing arrows, instead wielding one of its arrows like a weapon.

It was much faster now, even faster than I was. It caught up, and tried to stab me with the arrow. I smacked the arrow out of the skeleton's hand with the stick, and caught it, turning the arrow towards the skeleton. It produced another one from... Where the hell was it getting all these arrows from, watching it all this time I _still_ couldn't tell. We took turns stabbing and shuffling around avoiding the other's arrow. As we danced around the forest in our fight, I couldn't help but feel like something was missing. It took a while for me to realize it, but what's a dance without some music? I started to get excited as one of the many battle themes from Rhyndraxxia began emanating from my person. Our dance slowly shifted to match the rhythm of the music, and I couldn't help but get carried away in it. That ended when I suddenly had an arrow protruding from my shoulder. The music ended abruptly, and both the skeleton and I froze.

I slowly looked towards my shoulder and, as if seeing it suddenly made it real, pain exploded throughout my arm. I cried out, and fell to my knees, then on to my back, clutching my shoulder. I noticed that the sky above had started to turn a deep crimson color. A few seconds later, the skeleton had pulled its bow out again, and had an arrow aimed at me. My previous confidence in taunting the skeleton was instantly drained, and the familiar fear of a final blow took its place. The skeleton put a foot on my chest to pin me down, and pulled the arrow farther back. Then it let go. The arrow pierced through my other arm, pinning it to the ground with a loud **_thump_**. I let out an animal-like yelp. The skeleton certainly seemed to be enjoying this.

I hated this so much. There wasn't anything I could do. I laid there with tears streaming down my face, mixing into the pool of blood beneath me. My internal HP bar was draining away with these arrows stuck in me. There wasn't anything I could do, anything I tried to resulted in more pain immediately causing me to cringe and fall back down. I could feel my HP draining rapidly already, and the skeleton was preparing another arrow. In all my time alive, this has never happened to me before, there's always been some way out, something I could do to escape, even just being able to respawn, but if I died now I'd be gone forever. I regretted coming out here alone, without even telling anyone. A million things rushed through my mind all at once, but one thing repeated itself over and over. I was going to die here. I shut my eyes and sobbed quietly. I heard the sound of the bow firing, and the last thing I could hear was a bone-shattering _**crack**._

* * *

 **POV: 'OmegaShayn'**

I arrived at the meeting point. Vic wasn't there, but somebody else was.

The moment I came into view, he spoke. "Empty your inventory, right now, or I will kill you." he said. He wore a large black cloak covering him from the neck down. His face was hidden by a large black mask. A thief, obviously. As if to prove my point, he pulled out a jagged dagger and waved it at me. It was extremely sudden, and for a while, I stared blankly at him. I tossed the map I was holding on to the ground, as well as a dirt block. The thief seemed shocked. "In a day and a half, this is all you've managed to gather?" he asked. I shrugged. "I don't actually know what I'm doing, everything I have I got from a friend." I said nonchalantly. Maybe he would believe that was all I had, though I had much more supplies in my inventory. "Have. You said have. What else do you still have on you?" he said, getting angry as he said it.

"All I have is on the ground, and since you haven't picked it up, it's still technically mine, hence why I said 'have'" I responded, trying to sound bored. "No no, you still have stuff, now drop it or I really will kill you." he insisted. Great, I got busted because my robber is a moron. An idea came to mind though. I pulled up my inventory screen, and tapped both my sword and shield. They instantly materialized in each of my hands. "YEAH, I want those, gimme those!" he shouted, waving the dagger around again. He wasn't even _near_ me, so I didn't feel too threatened. Vic hadn't trained me for PvP, but I felt like I might be able to do it. I raised the shield up in front of me, held my sword behind me, and charged at the thief.

I obviously surprised him, he stumbled back and almost dropped his dagger. I couldn't exactly see past the shield though, so I slammed right into him with it, throwing him backwards, and me off balance. Before I could recover, he had bounced back up and was rushing me with his little knife. He tried to stab at me with it, but my shield caught it. If there's one thing I've learned so far, it's that if you stab something and it doesn't vanish, your weapon gets stuck. This proved to be true still, as his dagger got stuck in the shield. I pulled back on the shield, ripping the weapon out of his hand, but the weight of the shield pulled me back, once again throwing my off balance. I recovered faster this time, but not before he managed to rip my sword from my hand. I quickly opened my inventory and replaced my empty hand with whatever was left. I found myself dual wielding shields, somewhat menacingly towards the thief. He swung at me several times, but I blocked it every time. I was holding two shield, it'd be pretty sad if I _didn't_ block every attack. I managed to slam a shield against him a few times, but that was tiring my arms too quickly. He started swinging wildly, putting me into a defensive-only position.

He was starting to hit pretty hard, and at some point I fell down trying to block an attack. I couldn't keep up my defense forever, the durability bars were wearing away quickly on both shields. I scooted back, trying to get away, and ended up with my back to a tree, hiding behind my shields. The shields were reaching their last sliver of life. I started to get an idea in my head for a way out of this situation. The thief swung again, and my shields both exploded into a million tiny splinters. I jumped up and tackled him, knocking him to the ground. The sword flew out of his hands and embedded itself into the ground. I sent several punches to his face, which only managed to piss him off. He threw me off of him, and another dagger materialized in his hand. "I have to admit, that was interesting, but you're not gonna win today. Now, prepare to di-" his words were cut off by an arrow flying into his mouth and impaling the back of his throat. He gargled and coughed blood, and fell to the ground.

It seemed that Vic had arrived. I don't remember him having a bow though, must've picked it up while he was filling in his map. "Thanks, you had perfect timing.." I said, a little out of breath. I didn't get a response, but instead another arrow tore through the forehead of the thief, and he stopped squirming. I looked to where the arrow came from, and instead of seeing Vic like I had expected, there was a skeleton there, bow and arrow in hand, staring at me. It slowly lowered its bow and walked over to me. At this point, it didn't faze me, and I wasn't at all surprised when the skeleton offered its hand for me to grab. I accepted the help, and the skeleton pulled me to my feet. It was kind of awkward for me to be helped by a monster like this. I glanced over at the thief's corpse, and in an instant, the skeleton had drawn its bow again and fired another arrow at it. The body disappeared in a puff of smoke, leaving behind a few small daggers, the black cloak and mask, and an apple.

The skeleton gathered the items scattered across the ground. It returned my items to me, and the apple, but kept the thief's cloak, mask, and weapons. I almost felt bad for the thief. Almost. His death definitely didn't seem pleasant, and now he'd be sitting around doing nothing for who knows how long, but he did try to rob me, and attempted to kill me too, so...

An arrow whizzed by me. I immediately looked to the skeleton, but it didn't have its bow out. "Shayn! Get down!" I heard Vic shout from the direction the arrow came from. I dropped to the ground, and another arrow flew by, barely missing the skeleton. It pulled its bow out, and aimed it where the previous arrow came from. Vic appeared from behind a tree, slowly approaching, with a bow aimed at the skeleton. He fired again, and almost immediately after, the skeleton did too. Their arrows collided, broke against each other, and fell to the ground in pieces. I'm guessing Vic ran out of arrows, since he switched to a sword and ran straight at the skeleton. The skeleton pulled out another arrow and prepared to fire. Vic was probably going to kill the skeleton that had just saved me, and if he didn't, then that skeleton was going to kill Vic. I wasn't happy with either outcome.

I got up as quickly as I could and rushed to do something. I opened my inventory and equipped two more shields. Now that I think about it, I probably had more shields than were really necessary, but I'm glad I did. I stepped in between Vic and the skeleton, catching an arrow and a sword in each of my shields. Vic's sword pierced through the shield, stopping just an inch away from my body. I put both shields away, also somehow managing to steal Vic's sword as it vanished with my shield, and held on to the skeleton's bow to prevent them from firing.

"...Shayn, any particular reason you're defending this skeleton?" Vic asked, sounding surprised. "They saved my life a minute ago, I figured I could do the same." I said. Vic straightened himself and relaxed, and the skeleton put its bow away in its... Seriously, where the hell is it putting its equipment?! I could tell Vic was wondering the same thing, he had the same puzzled look I did. "Well... So long as it doesn't try to kill us, I suppose I won't do the same to it," Vic said, "and hey, where's your map?" I handed it to him, and he put them side-by-side to see what we'd found. According to Vic's map, there was just trees in his direction, unlike mine. "I managed to find a lake, a small flower patch here..." I said, pointing to my map, "...and there was someone's house here. I'm pretty sure this skeleton's been stalking me up and down this area." I said, tracing my path to our current location. Vic nodded and said, "I didn't exactly find anything, and we can't do much with what you found, so let's move on." He took a few steps in another direction, and I tapped his shoulder and pointed to the red sky above the trees. "Or maybe we can camp here for a while..." he said, sounding disappointed.


	9. Dream

**POV: 'OmegaShayn'**

We cleared a spot and made a small camp for the night.

I put together two small houses, and Vic placed torches all over the place around them to keep monsters from spawning anywhere near the camp. We ended up making my house a bit bigger, because I refused to let the skeleton stay outside all night, and we didn't have enough materials for a third house. Vic made it very clear that while he may tolerate a monster staying with us, he wasn't going to have an undead creature staring at him all night, which was understandable. As soon as the sun had set, Vic went to bed, but I wasn't even tired. I sat on my bed, bored out of my mind. Considering the situation we were in, I shouldn't have been bored. Usually in the stories I've read about game-kidnapping, it would be more exciting than this. There'd be that entity always causing trouble for that one group of people, or everybody, but I haven't heard of them since we first got here. _'What if they brought us here and just... Left?'_ I thought to myself. The idea bothered me, so I distracted myself by watching the skeleton.

It was interesting watching it try to put the black cloak on, putting an arm here, a leg there, getting fabric caught on its bones, and eventually becoming a tangled mess of bones and fabric on the ground. I sighed and got up from my _very comfortable_ spot on the bed to help the skeleton get untangled and properly put the the cloak on. But not before wadding the cloak up with the skeleton inside and carrying it around a little. It was a little heavy, maybe 30 pounds or so, but it was kinda easy to carry. I had to put it down after arrow tips started piercing through the cloak, probably in an attempt to stab me. When the skeleton got out of the make-shift bag, it flicked me in the forehead and went back to trying to put the cloak on, succeeding after a few more attempts. "Well _fine,_ I wasn't going to help you anyway." I mumbled as I returned to my spot on my bed. The skeleton started bumping into the door. It seemed like it was trying to go outside, but I guess it couldn't open the door. I groaned and got up from my spot _again_.

I walked up to the skeleton, grabbed its freezing cold hand, put it on the doorknob, turned it, and pushed the door open. The skeleton's jaw dropped. Literally, fell off on to the floor. It quickly bent over and reattached it, before heading outside. I figured it would be fine, it was one of the monsters after all, what's the worst that could happen? And now that it knew how to open a door, it can come back whenever it was ready too. I sat back on my bed. Several minutes later I heard Vic shouting, and got up as quickly as I could. Before I could leave the room though, the skeleton burst through the door and hid behind me. Immediately after, Vic appeared in the doorway, drenched from head to toe and clearly pissed off. "Your little skeleton buddy over there decided to soak me in my sleep." he grumbled. It took me a while to convince him to not tear the skeleton limb-from-limb, but eventually he relented and went back to bed. I barricaded the door with a couple of wooden blocks to avoid any more problems, then tried to sleep. Sleep came slowly, as the world faded to black, then nothing.

* * *

My eyes shot open suddenly, and I was filled with an overwhelming feeling of dread. I found that I was no longer in my bed, and looked around. The ground below me trembled slightly, and everything seemed to be shaking. I was standing in what looked like the ruins of a massive city. The sky was a pale grey color, with thick black clouds rapidly moving across it. I had a sudden feeling that I needed to run, and bolted down one of the stone streets. I heard a loud crash behind me, and the ground shook violently causing me to stumble and almost fall. When I turned to see what it was, I immediately regretted it. A horrific, pitch black aberration of thousands of twisted limbs and tendrils burst through the wall of a building, sending splintering fragments of wood and stone everywhere. It shifted erratically, moving in short bursts, then suddenly turned towards me. As soon as it did, two blinding beams of light erupted from it, both aimed at me. It opened what seemed to be a mouth, and let out an ear-splitting shriek, revealing endless rows of teeth that shouldn't realistically fit inside its gaping maw.

As if that wasn't bad enough, I could hear distant shrieks in response. Absolutely terrified out of my mind, I ran as fast as I could away from there. The street was ripped apart, with massive holes extending forever downwards in some spots. I heard more crashing behind me, and several more beams of light trained themselves on me. I panicked and tripped on a massive crack in the road, getting my foot caught in the process. I panicked even more and struggled to get my foot unstuck. I could see one of those monstrosities charging directly at me from farther down the road. Suddenly, the ground in front of me broke apart, and a massive black tentacle burst from the opening. It smashed at the ground on either side of me, before finally grabbing me, tearing me free from the crack, then sucking me under the street with it as it retracted. I was being pulled downwards extremely fast, and it seemed like forever.

Eventually, the ground became a roof of sorts for an immense fiery cavern. The area was filled with smoke, and was choking the air out of my lungs. Everything around me was on fire, and smelled of burning corpses. I was surrounded by what seemed to be massive pillars of red rocks, and below that was a massive sea of molten rock and fire. The heat was so intense, I felt like I was being cooked alive. But that wasn't the worst of it all. I hated this tentacle for taking me with it, but I hated it more when it stopped. I wish it had kept going. A giant swirling cloud of some pitch black substance stood before me. Many tentacles like the one currently holding me protruded from it, reaching up towards the ceiling, some forcing their way through it. I was pulled inside of the dark cloud, and it felt like the tentacle let go. My feet met something solid, but it was too dark to tell what.

Slowly, the area started to glow, and I found myself standing on a large wooden platform. My fear was starting to die down, that is, until I noticed the smoldering, writhing mass on the floor ahead of me. At first, it was swirling like the cloud around me, but it slowed and started to unwind. Two freakishly long arms reached out from it, and grasped at the ground in front of me. Then the thing stood up, becoming nearly ten feet tall, six feet of which were made of its four hoofed legs. I thought of the Enderman creature Vic had spoke of, but... This couldn't be it. Four more arms extended from the creature's back, and curled around its chest like a rib cage. A large pair of bat-like wings unfurled from its back, and three heads formed at the top of its body, two of which hung outwards, away from the body on large arm-like appendages. The two on the sides each had a massive eye that opened and emitted beams of light like the creatures on the surface. The center head was a large burnt skull, with glowing white eye sockets, and that same light shined from inside its mouth whenever it opened. Its whole body looked warped and twisted, and incredibly burnt.

At first, it seemed to simply stare at me, making a slight hissing sound as it did. Then it took a few stumbling steps towards me, and stopped in front of me, it's massive legs taking only a second to cross the previously twenty foot gap between us. The odd way it moved was... Unsettling. It continued to make the hissing sound as it squatted down, and brought its middle head down right in front of me, its two others watching me from the sides. The hissing stopped, and was replaced by a somewhat calm, but raspy voice. " _Lost... Lost child..._ " it said, referring to me. " _You... Are brother... Sean Chevalier._ " I flinched at the sound of my name being wheezed out of this horrifying creature. "H-how do you know that-?" I asked, sounding much more scared than I hoped I had. I didn't know it was possible to smile with one's eyes, but the heads beside me somehow proved me wrong. " _You are... Missing sister..?_ " it asked. I nodded, taking a step back. My older sister went missing about six months back, vanished entirely without a trace. It scared me even more to think this monster might know that. The odd smile it gave off grew wider.

" _She's here... Alive I... Promise... Helped me... Many times... Can't find... Her though... Can feel... Can't see... I owe her... She misses... You... I will help... Bring you to... Her..."_ it continued, before reaching behind itself with one of it's shorter back limbs. As much as I appreciated not getting murdered by this thing, having it act like this was almost just as unpleasant. " _For now... Though... Just live... We will meet... Again..."_ it said, pulling its hand back out again. In it, it held a golden amulet, covered in odd markings that pulsed with a red glow. " _Show this to... The monsters... They may look... The other way... It has some... Other uses... Too..."_ it hissed as it gently placed the amulet around my neck. Its hand just barely brushed against my skin. The scorched flesh left a warm, but extremely unpleasant feeling on my neck. " _We still have... Some time..."_ it said, " _If you want... You may ask... Me a question..."_ I thought for a moment, my thoughts somewhat clouded with fear, then asked, "What exactly are you?" The smile grew much wider, and I could feel its whole manner suddenly change. It stood up, and posed menacingly. " _I am the... Bane of Humanity...! Some call me... Herobrine...! Fewer call me... Demon King Syddium..._ " it shouted, its voice echoing slightly. _"Goodbye... Sean... Survive until... Next time..."_ it wheezed, as everything became dark again...

* * *

I woke slowly, and shifted around a little as my mind attempted to figure out where I was. I was laying down again, but I was on the floor instead of the bed. After everything that had just happened, it didn't seem surprising that I'd rolled off my bed. I slowly sat up and groaned, as my whole body ached as I did so. ' _Maybe I should teach the skeleton to put me back on the bed if I fall off...'_ I thought to myself. I glanced around the room to find the skeleton, and I certainly found it. On my bed. The skeleton laid there, seeming to be asleep. ' _That son of a... It stole my bed!'_ I didn't realize that monsters slept. Vic mentioned they were active during the night, and that skeletons burned in the daylight, so they were either active or... Dead. The word _monster_ made me remember my dream, so I reached for my neck. To my surprise, my hand was met with the feeling of warm metal. I lifted it up and looked down, seeing the pulsing golden amulet from earlier. I remembered I was supposed to show it to monsters, maybe I could test it on the skeleton?

I shook it awake, and it quickly sat up and looked around. Its gaze almost immediately rested on the object dangling from my neck. It stared for a few seconds, then looked up at me. It then put a hand on the amulet, and the light started to fluctuate, and gradually started to glow brighter. Suddenly, it flashed brightly, blinding me. When my vision returned, not much had changed, except... Laying on my bed, wrapped in a black cloak was a person. She had long, messy grey hair, and soft grey eyes, with pale skin. She had a little smile, and had her hand on the amulet. It didn't take me long to figure out that she was supposed to be that skeleton. She opened her mouth as if to say something. A strange, quiet noise came out of her mouth, and she immediately covered her mouth with both hands, seeming shocked. She looked back up at me, still shocked. She slowly uncovered her mouth and started making other vocalizations. I wondered if this could somehow be my sister. She liked playing tricks on people, like the skeleton had earlier with Vic and that water. Carefully, I knelt down in front of her.

"Hello there, skeleton girl..." I said awkwardly. She stopped making sounds, and stared at me. This has to have been the strangest moment in all my life. "Um... My name is Sean, do you happen to know me?" I asked, unsure of what I was even doing. She stared at me for a little while longer. "Shh... Sean." she said, sounding about as unsure as I did. I smiled. Her voice was kinda cute. I didn't want to rule out the possibility of this being my sister, who knows what could have happened to her in the last six months, but I was pretty sure she wasn't. She smiled back, and said 'Sean' a few more times, sounding a little excited. Then her eyes sudddenly became pinpricks, and she lunged at me, tackling me to the floor. One thing I hadn't considered was the possibility that she was completely naked underneath the cloak, a possibility I discovered to be real as she landed on top of me. She sat up, still on top of me, pulled a bow out from inside the cloak, somehow, and then aimed it at the barricaded door. I had a full frontal view of... Everything, as the cloak parted in the front. I felt a blush creep up my face, and looked towards the door instead, whatever she was pointing at.

Cracks started to form in the top block, and it vanished. I saw Vic on the other side of it. He was whistling and odd tune as he broke the second block. "Gooood morning Shayn, time to pack up an..." he stopped as soon as he actually looked and saw me and the skeleton girl, who still had a bow aimed at him. She slowly lowered it when she saw him. "Shayn, buddy, I leave you alone for a few hours and you manage to find a girl and..." he also looked away when he noticed she was nude. "This is _not_ what it looks like, I swear." I said. He rubbed the back of his neck for a second, then replied, "I believe ya buddy. Come on out though, the dawn's ready to meet you. And please, explain to me what's going on while you're at it."

So we started to pack up the camp. It took quite a bit of effort, we got a little excessive with decoration of the houses, and then there were those torches that were everywhere. It felt like an eternity before we finally managed to find all the torches that had been scattered within the general vicinity of the camp. It took just as much effort to try and cover up the skeleton girl. We spent forever searching for some sheep and leftover spiders to make some clothes, and when we finally found the wool and string we needed, we realized neither of us knew how to make clothes. Using our own clothes to get an idea of a template that we needed, we managed to scrape together some decent clothes. They only just barely covered her, so we made her wear the cloak anyway. This was definitely the strangest day ever...

I started to explain what had happened last night after Vic had left soaking wet. He seemed surprised by my description of the entity from my dream, and froze when I mentioned the name Herobrine. "..I mean, I know I was bored and wanted everything to be more interesting, but this was just too weird. So then I wake up, thinking it's just... Hey Vic, you alright?" I asked. He responded with, "You do know who Herobrine is, right?" I shook my head, and he facepalmed. "Herobrine is a nonexistent ghost said to haunt Minecraft -the name of this game- who, for us, seems very real. I wouldn't be surprised if he's the one who kidnapped and brought us here." He walked a little faster, seeming to get excited the more he talked. "The place you met him, it sounds an awful like the nether, this world's version of hell. So maybe, if we get to the nether and defeat him," he started to jog, then run in whatever direction we were headed, "maybe then, we can get home. You know, I've read thousands of stories like this, but I never thought I'd live it!" he shouted, almost sprinting now.

So that was our mission, we decided. Get to the nether, defeat Herobrine, then go home. We finally left the forest behind, stocked up on wood and apples. Before we can start to worry about our mission though, we needed to find a decent place to settle. Thankfully, such a place soon presented itself as a large silhouette on the horizon, highlighted by the sun. I wish I could say we ran there no problem, but our third member got tired at some point, and had to be carried. She was _much_ heavier than thirty pounds now.


	10. Fortress

**POV: 'OmegaShayn'**

The trip there was a breeze, and rather boring in my opinion.

At first, we couldn't tell what the object in the distance was, it was just a blurred mass against the sky. But as we got closer, it became much easier to see. Six colossal pillars of stone rose from the ground, each connected to two others by gigantic stone walls, forming a stone fortress easily the size of a small town. Rising from the center of said fortress was a tower much bigger than the rest, twice the width and maybe three times as tall, reaching up towards the sky. It took us half the day to reach it, yet we could see it from miles away. Ironically, compared to the epic proportions of the rest of it, the entrance was... Plain. It was a single wooden door with a sign above it that read "Front Entrance". I expected it would be harder to get through, but we opened the door, no problem, and walked right in. The inside was massive, with thousands of trees and dirt mounds scattered across it. There was a clear path through all of it, leading to the large central tower, a single house at its base, and a small farm set off to the side of its entrance. Vic went to check out the farm, and the skeleton girl and I went to check the house. It's not like we were raiding it or anything, just looking around.

The house was simple, stone walls and a wood roof with a door in the front. The door didn't seem to be attached to the walls or anything though, it looked like it was sticking out a little. I knocked and waited for a response. There was a loud crash from inside the house, and a few seconds later, the door flew open - outwards. It slammed against me, and threw me off to the side, as someone burst out of the house shouting, "Zombies!" Judging from his voice, it sounded like a guy. From head to toe, he was covered in a metal suit armor, somewhat resembling a knight. He wore a cylindrical helmet with a 'T' shaped hole in the front. It was extremely dark inside it, with nothing visible but two dim green lights that I assumed were eyes. The eyes slowly turned towards me, and he suddenly jumped back in surprise. I slowly stood up again, saying, "If this is how you people are always going to react, I'm just going to stop knocking." He seemed to panic, and apologized profusely, before introducing himself.

"Hello there! My name's Silos, it's a pleasure to meet you!" he said. "Yeah um, I'm Shayn, it was a pleasure to meet your door." I said, a little sarcastically. He rolled his eyes, then gestured to the empty fortress and said, "Greetings, and welcome to Fort Suel! I started building it as soon as we arrived. Impressive, right?" His face seemed to glow as he asked that, but I didn't get a chance to answer. An arrow scraped along the top of his helmet leaving a small scratch where it hit, before embedding itself in the ground off to the side. I immediately looked to the skeleton girl, but she was empty handed. Silos' eyes vanished, as he groaned and mumbled something about a lack of torches and holes before running into the central tower. Another arrow flew at us from somewhere on the tower, probably from a window, though I couldn't tell where exactly on the tower it came from. It hit the ground a few feet from either the skeleton girl or I. More arrows starting coming, getting closer to us with each one, so I pulled out my shield and held it up towards the tower.

As soon as I did though, the arrows stopped coming, and when I peeked out over the shield, I saw a skeleton falling from a short distance up the tower. It hit the ground and flashed red, but quickly got up again, drawing its bow and taking aim at me. Before I could react, an arrow flew past me, though it wasn't from the skeleton. The arrow tore into the skeleton's skull, embedding in its forehead. The skeleton flashed red again before falling over and disappearing in a puff of smoke, only leaving behind a single bone. This time I was certain it was the skeleton girl, and a quick look behind me verified that. I was surprised though, she was a skeleton not that long ago, yet she killed another one without a problem. She didn't seem the least bit bothered by it, in fact she seemed to be smiling. She quickly picked up the bone and ran away somewhere with it.

I was going to follow her, but Silos came out of the tower, waving and calling me over. He was peeking out from behind a door, occasionally taking a glance back inside the tower. When I got close, he started quietly talking. "So, I may have a bit of a problem… You see, I have my storage room much higher in the tower and… Well, take a look." he said as he opened the door a bit wider allowing me to see inside. I couldn't see the whole inside, because the only source of light in the room was the light coming in from the door, but the area that I could see was already huge. The only portion of the room that I could see was crawling with hundreds of monsters, with the floor barely visible between the many bodies shifting about the room. A chill went down my spine as the unnatural number of moving limbs reminded me of those nightmarish creatures from my dream, and I took a quick step back. "...And that's just this floor," Silos said, "currently my chests are on floor 85..." I gasped, too loud it seems, because every visible head in the tower's room immediately turned in my direction, and I imagine there were thousands more that _weren't_ visible. Silos immediately spun around the door and shut it, forcing his body against it to keep it closed. There were several loud bangs against the door before it went quiet again. He sighed and said, "You have no idea how quickly I had to run to fill that gap in the wall upstairs..."

He slowly got up and without another word, walked away towards his house. Not having much else to do, I went to look for Vic. Considering that the ground here wasn't flat, it was scattered with little hills and trees, finding him was probably going to be difficult. I spent two hours or more looking around for him, finally finding him at Silos' house, leaning against its open door. He was talking to someone inside, most likely Silos. As soon as he saw me, he waved me over, and started talking when I got to him. "I'm sure you're already aware of this guy's situation in the tower up there." he said, and I nodded. He then gestured to Silos, who was casually sitting on some kind of stair-block, and continued speaking. "Sil' over here has basically agreed to help supply our little quest, if _we_ help him clear out that tower. What do you say to that?" he asked. Unfortunately, I _was_ aware of the situation in the tower. The image of so many monsters flashed through my head... I shuddered, and immediately shook my head 'no'. Vic visibly flinched, and scratched the back of his head before pulling me to the side, out of view of the doorway.

"Look, okay, Shayn? I need to explain a little something to you. This Herobrine guy we're after? He's not going down easily. You've already seen him right, some kind of nightmarish demon? Do you think we're going to kill that with just an archer you picked up, yourself and I? We don't even have a place to stay the night! This guy has a _fortress_ man, a fortress he made _by himself_ in _two days,_ and he's willing to help us out for just clearing a little tower." He then glanced at the tower and gave a funny look, then said, "Okay, maybe it's a big tower, but it's still our best shot at this. But I'm really going to need you on this one, because I can't do this alone." His face had an almost pleading expression. I sighed, and said, "Alright fine, but if I lose my only life because of this, I'm gonna find a way to haunt your ass until this is over." He gave me a wide smile, saying 'You won't regret it,' or something along those lines. He popped back into the doorway, telling Silos that we'd be clearing out the tower. I listened in on the conversation for a while. Silos apparently wasn't a very good fighter, but he's a great miner, and builder obviously. He'd set up a place for us to live, and gather resources for us to use as we worked our way through the tower. I wasn't exactly happy with this, but I figured that it was better than nothing, and I could get some live practice in monster fighting.

We spent the last of our daylight clearing an area to build a house. We made it close to the tower, that way we'd have quick access to it whenever we decided to go in. Our house had five rooms: three bedrooms - one for each of our members, a large storage room packed with chests, and a crafting room with a crafting table and a few furnaces. It had two floors, the first containing the crafting and storage room, with a staircase in the crafting room leading to the second floor, which had all the bedrooms. I wanted to get really decorative, but unfortunately the house wasn't big enough to fit even a quarter of what I wanted to. I was still pretty happy with how it looked in the end. Vic sought out the skeleton girl and brought her to the house, showing her around it while I lit up the area outside the house. It was officially night at this point, so I was about ready to head for bed. We'd be starting on that first room in the tower tomorrow. I noticed that, apart from our house, nothing in the entire fortress was lit up. It's no wonder the tower was filled to the brim with monsters. I made sure to add torches to my mental supply list of what to bring tomorrow while I went inside. Saying a quick 'goodnight' to the other two people, even though only one of them probably understood it, I flopped into bed exhausted. I did have to carry someone for half the day after all, and built at least 75% of this house myself. Before I even knew it, I was fast asleep.

* * *

I was caught off guard by the stifling heat, but it didn't faze me at all. I once again was on the wooden platform surrounded by darkness and heat. I looked around for the monster I had last seen here, but was surprised to find that it wasn't here. Even more surprising was what I _did_ find instead. Sitting in a chair across the room was a man, who looked almost completely normal. He had blue jeans and a cyan shirt, flesh that _wasn't_ burned to all hell, and short brown hair. The only thing strange about him, besides his presence here, were his eyes. They were pure white, faintly glowing the same color. He wasn't paying attention to me, but was instead looking at a picture he held in his hands. He then looked up, noticed I was here, then put the picture away saying, "Sorry, I thought you'd take a little longer getting here." He then snapped his fingers, and another chair appeared a short distance across from him. "Come, sit down, if you stand this whole time again, you'll be tired in the morning." he said, gesturing to the chair. I gladly did so, as my legs were feeling a little sore. He smiled and asked, "How was the gift?" pointing to the amulet around my neck. I shook my head and said flatly, "I'm not sure I like it." Everything went silent, and he seemed shocked. He then sighed, scratching his head.

"I thought guys liked mob talker... Would you rather it did something else?" he asked, and I immediately nodded. He rolled his eyes and held his hand out, so I took the amulet off and placed it in his open hand. He flipped it around a few times, looking at all the markings covering it. His eyes briefly glowed a little brighter, and all the glowing marks floated off the amulet. They twisted and swirled around him, slowly unwinding and connecting to each other, until there were three large glowing rings slowly spinning around him. He looked up at me and seemed to notice the look of awe on my face. "A very long time ago, in a place far away from here, I used to be really good with magic. More specifically, imbuing objects with magic." he said, gently tapping one of the rings. The ring seemed to ripple in response, and unfolded into a straight line, with one end attached to the tip of his finger. He then started drawing new markings on the amulet with his finger, slowly using up the line as he did so. "This is the only time I'm redoing this for you, okay? You're getting a gift from the enemy, you don't get to be picky about it." he said. When the first set of markings were complete, he tapped the next ring and started drawing again. "This amulet was a symbol of the monster armies that once rose up to defeat me, and they left me one to look at for the time I'd been defeated. They've disbanded already, but many still know what it means, so there's a chance that if you show one this amulet, it'll leave you alone. So long as you didn't try to attack it already, of course." Eventually, he finished and handed it back to me. "If you end up killing them anyways, you can make use of this." he said.

"Moving on, I've been watching you from here, as well as a few other interesting groups... I noticed you've decided that I'm the one responsible for this whole thing, so you going to try to kill me, right?" he asked. I wasn't actually sure, so I asked, "You're Herobrine, right?" and he smiled wide. "You really don't know what I look like? Yes, I am Herobrine, as well as the monster you saw the other night, we are one in the same. You asked me last time, and I already told you, I am Herobrine." I nodded, saying, "Then yeah, we're planning on killing you." His smile grew wider as he said, "That's too bad, because I'm not the one who brought you here. I would never attempt something this big on my own. But I'm going to take advantage of this opportunity anyway, now that you're all here. From this point on, I'm going to give you players hell." He slowly leaned back in his chair, looking like he was waiting for something. Five minutes passed in silence. "And you're telling me this… Why?" I asked. He quickly sat back up again, and resumed talking. "Thank you, finally. First of all, I've had all these big plans and nobody to tell them to for forever now, it's boring. Most of the monsters here are dumber than slimes, _especially_ the slimes, so it's no use talking to them. Second, I'm making an exception for you. While I will not grant you immunity to my wrath upon this world, I still owe your sister a great deal. So, to repay some of my debt to her, I shall... _Assist_ your survival... While I search for her."

"Which brings me to my next point." he said, "I noticed that you've decided to take on that idiot's tower. First off, I commend you for your bravery. Second, that is one of the stupidest ideas I've ever heard of, and I've had to deal with people that thought they could fight off fire by setting themselves on fire. There are enough monsters in there to destroy a kingdom, and they're all crowded into enclosed spaces. You won't be able to do that with just the little group you have. Lucky for you, one of the monsters loyal to me happens to be in that area. I'll send them over in the morning to assist you all. It's best you meet them outside the walls of that cobblestone mess, you don't want them to run into one of your friends first. I can try to make them look human, to blend in better, but you're going to ha-" he cut himself off as his eyes flashed a few times. He sighed, and said, "Time flies." before everything started to go dark.

* * *

I woke up slowly, feeling sore. When I opened my eyes and looked around, I noticed I was on the floor beside my bed. ' _Must've rolled out of bed again..._ ' I thought, still partially asleep. I sat up slowly, stretching to find out where I was sore, exactly. I was about to get up, when I noticed something on my bed. To be more specific, some _ONE_ on my bed. "Really? _Again_?" I complained. The skeleton girl was once again on my bed, sound asleep. Why she was, I don't know, I built a room for her already. But I had other things to be doing right now, I didn't want to be late. I quickly packed up the equipment I'd need later on for the tower, set it in a chest by the door to the house, and headed outside the entrance of the fort. The sun was just beginning to rise, casting a long shadow of the fort across the plains. I waited a while, enjoying the view. 'I could get used to this...' I thought to myself. I sat down to wait, leaning against the wall. About an hour passed before anything happened. I heard someone approaching, and turned to greet them. "Jesus Christ it took long enou-" I started. I was cut off by an ear-splitting shriek. I jumped back, and finally realized what I was looking at. Standing in front of me was a person, or at least something in the shape of one. It was almost entirely pitch black, and was disappearing and reappearing, being there one moment and vanishing for a split second before appearing again, like a flickering light. It had blood red eyes, and a large holographic red warning sign hovering in front of its face. It shrieked again, before lunging towards me, wrapping both hands around my neck and squeezing hard. There was a sharp pain in my throat as it tried to strangle me. I tried to pry its hands off and kick it away, but it had a _very_ tight grip on me. My lungs started to burn and the corners of my vision were going black the longer it held me there. I frantically kicked and swung at it, eventually knocking it back. I got up as quickly as my body would allow, drawing my sword with some difficulty.

The creature had fallen over on to its back, but didn't bother to get back up. Instead it just raised its head to look at me, then crawled across the ground on all fours at an insane speed. I panicked and swung at it wildly. As soon as it reached me it jumped on to its feet and tackled me, simultaneously getting impaled by the blade. It didn't react at all to being stabbed, grabbing me by the arm and hair, and forcing me to the ground. It held me there and looked me dead in the eyes. " _Let me out."_ it said, it's voice sounding distorted, and filled with static. Before I could even process what it said, it pulled its arm back, and slammed its fist into me. I expected an impact, but instead its hand went straight _through_ my body, as its arm phased through me. I felt a slight tug inside of me, and everything went cold. I couldn't move my body at all, and suddenly spikes of pain shot through my body, over and over again. Then the thing suddenly let out a blood curdling and constant scream, as it flickered much more rapidly before. The light from its eyes and the symbol floating in front of it slowly died down until they were gone, and the creature disappeared completely, leaving behind an echo of its scream. I managed to sit up despite every part of my body telling me to stop moving. I hoped that the large sword in its chest killed it.

It was another hour before the person I was supposed to meet finally arrived, by then I had recovered and managed to pull myself together again. I could hear them before I could see them. It started as a quiet whisper, carried by the wind. It evolved into a melodious tune playing out over the grassland. It was soft and somewhat calming. When the person finally came into view, I was caught off guard by her appearance. She had long bright green hair and dark blue eyes. She wore a plain white t-shirt and blue jeans, a black pair of shoes, and had a large pair of headphones resting on her neck. I was expecting some monster loosely in the shape of a human, and instead I got... Someone normal. "Hey, what's up?" she asked casually with a short wave. It took a moment to get over my surprise, but i managed to say 'Hello'. She took a look at the walls of the fort, giving a low whistle. "Wish I wasn't here to help you all," she said, "I'd _love_ to get my hands on this place." She then turned her head to look at me. "What kind of monster are you, exactly?" I asked, trying to figure out what she meant. She turned back towards the wall. "You know, it's kinda rude to ask what monster I am, especially before you've even asked my name. My name is Spark, and I'm a creeper, though I like to think I'm a human sometimes." she said.

She suddenly gasped and froze in place. "Waitwaitwaitwaaaiiiit! You're Sean right?! The guy I'm supposed to be meeting?!" she asked, sounding panicked. She relaxed when I told her yes. "Crap, I can't believe I almost told that to a complete stranger." she said, sighing. She leaned against the wall, watching me. A few minutes passed in silence. "Geez you're lame. Can we just go inside already? You're really boring, and I want to get this over with already." she said. I led the way to the entrance and we both entered. Neither of us were prepared for what was waiting on the other side of the wall.


	11. Inferno

**POV: 'OmegaShayn'**

Spark and I stood there in silence, trying to understand what was going on.

The trees were all on fire. Half the dirt mounds were now craters instead. There was a large, albeit very badly burned clearing rather than a path leading to the tower. Arrows were scattered across the _everything_. Silos and the skeleton girl where running around, throwing buckets of water on fires. Vic was sprawled out across the floor. The ground was coated in a thick layer of ashes. And worst of all, there was a massive hole in the side of the tower. I couldn't comprehend how something this bad could have happened.

 **POV: Vic**

 _~Two hours earlier~_

Another wonderful day!

I was woken up by the sounds of Shayn freaking out in the other room, most likely because I told that girl it was her room. Shayn'll thank me later, I'm sure. But for now, I'm just going to pretend it wasn't me. I heard him pass by outside my door and head downstairs. He dug through a bunch of the chests, then left out the front door. Probably wanted to go do something before we went to work on that tower. Based on what Sil' told me, it was going to be pretty difficult, so it couldn't hurt to prepare. Which reminded me, I wasn't exactly prepared yet either. I jumped out of bed and practically flew down the stairs into the storage room. Sil' had given us a few supplies to get started, and I intended to make use of them. I'm sure Shayn wouldn't know what to do with them anyway. I ran around the room, throwing open chests, grabbing iron, wood, food, flint -anything I thought could be useful, really- and hurled them into the next room with the workbenches. When I was done, I went over to that room and got to work. As usual, I decided to build myself two iron swords, my weapons of choice! I placed the ingredients on the workbench's crafting grid, and they snapped together, shifting around and blending into the shape of a sword. Normally, in this game, you could only use a single sword at a time, making dual wielding them pointless. But this was different, I was physically present within the game, and unlike the in-game avatar, _I_ can use both of my arms at the same time. I built an iron helmet, chestplate, and boots. I didn't make any leggings though, they would restrict the movement of my legs too much for my liking. The last thing I made was a flint and steel: a lighter. I always found setting my enemies on fire to be effective, as they would take damage constantly, even if I wasn't able to hit them.

I was about to rush out the door to try and find Shayn, when I had the most _amazing_ idea ever. The lighter I built was literally just a piece of flint and another piece of iron with a sharp tip to strike the flint with. Lighters had durability, meaning using them would eventually break them. My swords were made of iron, and had plenty of sharp edges. Swords also have durability, but that only goes down when breaking blocks or hitting mobs. So maybe if I used my sword on a regular piece of flint... Before I even knew it, i was already trying it. And it worked! Sparks flew out from the flint, lighting the wall on fire. I quickly put the fire out, feeling like an absolute _genius_ for trying that. Then I got an even _better_ idea. My swords often scraped against each other during battle in other games I've played, so maybe if I can somehow attach flint to the swords, I could set fires like that! I put down two of the three parts on the workbench, made sure I had a flint in one hand, and the last piece of the sword in the other. I placed the piece in and, as it was snapping together, slammed the piece of flint into the small space between the ingredients. The items… Didn't take it well. Rather than snapping together normally, they violently exploded all across the room, crashing into everything. I hid behind one of the furnaces, waiting for them to stop. They flew all over the room for a while longer, before slamming back together on the workbench. When I went to check it, I found exactly what I wanted. The cutting edges of the iron sword were still iron, but along the middle of the blade was a long strip of flint. Now I needed to make another one...

The second sword reacted much more calmly. When I put the flint into place on the workbench, the ingredients shook a little before putting themselves together. I held both blades up, marveling at my _expert_ crafting ability. Finally, I needed to test it! I built a bunch of armor stands and placed them outside, scattered randomly across the clearing around the house. I could barely contain my excitement as I pulled out both swords and stood before the first armor stand. "Oh-ho-ho, you _all_ are gonna die now!" I said as I got started. I slashed at it with one blade, then another, and they had normal effects. Then I swung both blades at it, scraping the edge of one across the flint of another. Sparks flew like mad, and the armor stand instantly went up in flames. Normally I'd need a magical enchantment to set something on fire with a weapon, but I'd done it with just an extra, easily obtainable ingredient! I wasn't satisfied just yet though, so I tore across the yard, slashing and scorching defenseless armor stands as I went. In less than a minute, they were all gone, with nothing left but the stone bases that held them up, and a pile of ash over each one. I felt _amazing_. So amazing, in fact, I bet I could take on the first room of the tower without Shayn! I quickly snatched up my armor, put it on, and ran to the door of the tower. It would just be this first room, and if things went south I could just run out the door.

I threw the door open, shouting out across the whole room. Everything instantly turned towards me. I charged in and body slammed a creeper out of my way. I realized as I was cutting a zombie down the middle, that this would be much easier than I thought. Only so many mobs could surround me at once, because everyone else will just be behind those mobs. If a skeleton tries to shoot me, it'll likely hit another mob, causing those two to fight and ignore me. If a creeper blows up, I can get away and it'll blow up the monsters around it. Anything else needs to get close and will have to face my wrath. I easily took down half the room in five minutes, letting creepers and skeletons do most of the work as I spun around the room setting fire to most, and cutting down whoever I didn't. I didn't even need to fight most of them, I just set fire and left, leaving them to burn to a crisp while I run off to the next. I was getting close to being done with the room, when I made one, single, disastrous mistake. I sent sparks towards a creeper, one that was too close to the wall. Sparks will ignite a creeper's _explosion_ , rather than setting the creature on fire. I had been using it to my advantage so far, blowing up creepers in the middle of large crowds of monsters, but this one... It puffed up, hissing loudly, before detonating, leaving a massive hole in the wall. I quickly pulled up my inventory screen, selecting any blocks I had, trying to fill the hole. Before I could do anything though, I heard another hiss, and was thrown outside by a creeper's blast. The monsters chased after me, pouring out from the hole.

I tried to get up, but I was too disoriented to do so. Technically, I should have died right there, I took a _direct_ explosion from a creeper, but I guess I got lucky somehow. I rolled on to my back, and looked back towards the tower. The room was filled with light from the outside, so I at least knew monsters wouldn't keep spawning. However, there were still plenty of monsters left. I rolled over again and pushed myself up slowly, as arrows started landing beside me. One hit me in the back of the head, but it bounced right off of the helmet, leaving only a small dent. When I finally stood up, I was met face to face with a hissing creeper. I barely managed to jump out of the way before it exploded. I landed right next to a sword. _My_ sword. I only now realized I wasn't currently holding them. They were probably blown out of my hands at the tower. I quickly grabbed it and turned towards the crowd of monsters. I was good with two swords, but I only needed one to be dangerous. I held the sword in one hand, and the 'steel' from the lighter in the other, wielding it like a weapon. After a few moments to recover, I rushed back into the horde of monsters. I wasn't going to let them get all over the fort just because I got a little cocky. I was much more clumsy this time, I wasn't a super soldier, pain slowed my movements and limited my range of motions. The skeletons were smart, undead creatures burn under direct sunlight, so they stayed in the tower providing long range support. The zombies however, were not as intelligent, despite having more brain than a skeleton should. I actually took a moment to consider that. How is a bare-bones skeleton more intelligent than a partially rotten zombie? My point was that the zombies were coming out to attack, simultaneously marching to their doom under the sun.

I threw sparks every chance I got, setting fire to spiders, creepers, zombies that hid under helmets from the sun, and unfortunately, I set fire to many trees as well. I wasn't fighting to kill just yet though, I wanted that other sword. So I fought through the crowd to find it, eventually managing to retrieve it. I guess the innumerable explosions finally caught the attention of Silos and that other girl, they came running out weapons drawn. The girl took aim at the skeletons in the back, and Sil' came out wielding an axe, splitting heads whenever he got a chance. The area was a blazing inferno at this point, the heat was making it hard to breath, my body hurt all over, I could barely stand, and I couldn't see straight. I wanted to say something cool, but before I got a chance to think of something, the ground was quickly falling towards me. Or maybe it was the other way around...

 **POV: 'OmegaShayn'**

We spent most of the day putting the fires out.

"If it's going to be like this every day, I'm leaving." Spark said. She didn't sound like she meant it though. We'd lit up the first room of the tower and sealed the staircase to the next floor so we could meet somewhere that _wasn't_ burned. Our house had burned down, and Silos' was missing a roof and most walls. We had built a make-shift table and seats out of some _stone_ blocks and stairs, since clearly wood wasn't safe around here. Vic was alive, but it didn't seem like he'd be getting up any time soon, his body was covered with cuts, burns, and bruises. Silos looked exhausted, he was slumped over in his chair, leaning against the table. The skeleton girl... Seemed surprisingly normal. "So, what exactly happened while I was out?" I asked. Silos shook his head, but the skeleton girl started pointing towards Vic. I still couldn't believe this, the whole fort managed to become a massive fire pit, the tower's base was blown open, and the entire first floor was completely _emptied_ , all in the couple of hours I was outside the walls. I mean sure, I managed to get attacked by a monster of some kind, but that's just _one_ monster compared to however many were in the tower. Silos looked like he was about to fall asleep, already nodding off, so I decided I would introduce Spark before he could. "I know a lot just happened," I said, gesturing to the hole in the wall and the land of ash and stone just outside it, "but while I was gone I found someone looking for a place to stay for a while, figured I'd ask you about it." Silos sat up a little, propping his head up against his arm. "It's fine by me, so long as they clean up some of this ash. You wouldn't mind helping us out would you, because I'm just gonna..." he said, before his head slipped off his arm and slammed against the table. He didn't get back up.

"That was a lot easier than I thought it would be." I mumbled. Spark rolled her eyes and said, "I hope you intend to tell me who these people are." I guess that makes sense, since everyone was either passed out or probably didn't know how to introduce themselves anyway. I started with Silos. "That guy is Silos, he built and owns this place, is letting us stay here, and is willing to help us in exchange for clearing out the tower. The other dude is Vic, I'm traveling with him since I don't know much about this game. The girl over there is... Well, I don't know if she has a name." The skeleton girl shrugged. At least she seems to understand speech, when I first met her I thought she was really dumb, or something. Spark suddenly punched me in the arm. "How rude! Do you ever take the time to ask somebody's name?!" Rubbing my arm, I thought about it. "Just once, I asked the guy who sent you." I said. Thinking about it, I realized that the only person I've asked was Herobrine, and I technically asked him what he is, not his name. She groaned and said, "He would have told you it anyways, so that doesn't count."

Shortly after, we went outside to try and clear out the ash. I had thought to use water buckets to wash it away somewhere else, probably the creeper craters, then we'd just cover them up. Spark had put on a pair of headphones to listen to music, but I could hear it very clearly. It sounded nearly the same as the song she had been playing earlier. The buckets were working quite well, and the ash was gone in an hour at most. We fixed Silos' house, and built a brand new one for us, this time much bigger with enough room to decorate. I based it off my own house, in a way. The first floor had a kitchen, dining room, living area, storage and crafting room, three bedrooms and a bathroom. The upstairs was mostly a long hallway, with a bathroom, a bedroom, and two spare rooms branching out from it. I was actually pretty happy with it this time, and I'm sure Vic would be too. I had chosen the room upstairs to be my own, decorating it accordingly. It had a brown carpet, blue bed, a small closet, a wooden desk, and a fake computer and digitizer on top of the desk. Despite the fact that I was limited by what I could learn from Spark about crafting recipes, it still looked pretty good, and I felt right at home.

The rest of the day passed uneventfully. We moved Silos to his house without waking him, and we had moved Vic over to his new room without him waking up either. I had offered to make a separate house for Spark, but she insisted that since we have so many rooms, she'll stay in ours, especially since she'd be working with us. The skeleton girl was down in the living room, though I don't know what she was doing. Spark turned out to be a really good cook, oddly enough. She had made a huge meal for everyone, with lots of chicken, some kind of sweet bread, and a soup made of mushrooms. The smell from all the food had finally woken Vic up, and he hobbled his way into the dining room. Eventually we were all seated there, eating and telling stories. Vic told us about what had happened earlier today, telling it like a joke of some kind. Everyone was shocked at what he had managed to accomplish. Spark told us about a massive guild she had been in a long time ago, one that was formed to fight a particular boss that ended up taking the whole guild and more to defeat. Once the boss was defeated, the whole guild disbanded, though it still unofficially exists. Apparently it had six sub-factions within it that often disagreed with each other, so getting stuff done was very difficult. I didn't really have any stories as amazing as theirs, so I mostly told them about a space-themed game I would play, and all the nonsense that happened there. The whole conversation was surprisingly normal, despite all that's happened recently. It was a nice change, I hoped it would stay that way for a while longer.

The sun had gone down, and Vic had gone to bed. After what happened today, I was surprised he hadn't left earlier. The skeleton girl had gone to bed too, apparently, leaving just Spark and I waiting around downstairs. I wasn't quite ready for sleep yet, and I wasn't in the mood to talk, so I went outside. I can't say I was comfortable being outside the walls alone again, but I didn't want to be easy to find right now, so I entered one of the wall's towers. The one I entered was surprisingly well lit up, with torches along the entire wall, and along a staircase going upwards. As I went up the stairs however, I noticed there were less torches the further up I went, getting to a point of having a large gap of darkness between each torch. Even the torches changed at some point, giving off a dim red glow instead of a burning light. It was an odd design choice, considering what happened to the central tower. When I finally reached the top, I found a small empty room with a window, nothing special about it. Seemed good enough for me. I sat down on the floor and leaned my back against a wall, just thinking about what's happened the last few days. It's been a lot so far, to me. I think I'm going to need a short break of some kind, at least for a little while. As I sat there, thinking to myself, I began to fall asleep. The world slowly faded away, and stayed that way.

* * *

 **POV: 'TwelveStepsBack'**

I regret everything I've done so far, it's cost me an arm and a leg.

Two days ago, I had found a player group that tried to take me in. I told them I'd think about it, but really I had no interest in helping them. I didn't need help surviving either. However, I was out here to help new players, so I started pointing players in their direction. I had been trying to guide a player there personally, but he died because he wasn't paying attention to where he was walking - fell right into a ravine while talking. He was arrogant, and was trying to flirt with me anyway, can't say I'd miss him. I'm glad I met him though, because shortly after our walk ended, I happened to hear something familiar. A song, 'Battle Theme 07' if I remembered correctly. A song from Rhyndraxxia. There's only one person I know who would be playing that song: Syr. I was about to leave, glad to know he was alright, when the music suddenly cut off. A few seconds later, I heard him cry out, and I immediately ran over there. It was too early for him to die, we had just started this damn thing, I'd be furious if I'd gone through all this trouble for it to end so quickly.

I tore through the trees to find him lying in a pool of blood, with a skeleton about to finish him off. I pulled out an axe as quickly as I could, but I knew I couldn't get the skeleton's attention in time to stop it firing. Instead I had just gotten in the way, letting the arrow hit my arm. It had ripped into my bone, giving off an exaggerated cracking sound as it did so. Unfortunately, I had put up my dominant arm to block, which caused me to drop my axe. The skeleton then fired into my left knee, dropping me to the ground. Honestly, I was pissed off about this whole thing, and adrenaline let me work through the pain, grabbing the axe in my left hand and splitting the skeleton's skull with it. It flashed red, but still stood tall, so I swung wildly at it, taking out my anger on it. I was still swinging even after the damned thing turned to smoke. When I finally realized it was dead, my body collapsed to the ground in pain. Syr was unconscious and slowly dying, so I only let myself lay there a few minutes before slowly bringing myself to my feet. I did my best to keep Syr alive, using some items I had left over from the game he came from. It was moderately effective, it kept him from dying, but he was unconscious still. I didn't do much about my own injuries, they hurt to all hell but they only did a set amount of damage to my player's "HP" so I'd live, and the pain would fade eventually. I spent the rest of that night hobbling through the forest, dragging Syr along behind me until we were in a small clearing. I tried to make a small shelter there, but I only half-assed it, just dirt walls a roof and a bed. I set Syr on the bed so he could recover. His body was disintegrating slowly, but I've seen this before, he'd be fine. The next day I went outside again after I made sure Syr would be okay. As I was wandering around looking for players though, I couldn't help but feel like I was being followed. It lasted the whole day, and only now stopped, since whoever had been following me finally made their presence known. I was sitting next to the bed Syr laid on, when a man entered the hole I used as a doorway. He wore a teal shirt and blue jeans. The door seemed to get blocked by a dark substance as he entered. He didn't even look at me, just stared at Syr, saying, "Found you..."


	12. Uninvited

**'TwelveStepsBack'**

The stranger seemed distracted, unaware of his surroundings.

His eyes were fixed on Syr, watching as his body slowly turned to large pixels that flaked off and vanished into the air. The man had strange, silver eyes, that made his eyes look almost wholly white. He was smiling wide, as if the sight was something to smile about.

I already didn't like him.

With my left hand I cautiously picked my axe off the ground, which he didn't seem to notice. "Who are you?" I asked, quickly standing and readying the axe. He took a small step back and finally looked my way. His eyes began to glow a faint white color, and he raised both his open hands towards me.

"What did you do to him?!" he shouted angrily. The dark mass blocking the door moved farther inwards, with what looked like small tendrils snaking their way along the doorway. His face then softened a little, and he put his hands down. "Clearly you're not in any shape to fight me, so let's not take it to that. I'm also guessing you're not the one who hurt him, by the looks of it." he relented, looking back towards Syr.

I threw the axe at him, and he barely stopped it an inch from his face. "If I were the one who attacked him, he'd be gone by now." I said before sitting back down. He sighed and tossed the axe to the side. An awkward silence filled the room.

"...to answer your question, I go by Herobrine. But something tells me you'll know me better as the 'Demon King Syddium.'" he suddenly announced, turning towards me. His eyes had become another color, a shining gold. He blinked a couple times, as they faded back to the silver color from before.

"I remember you, I think." he whispered. "You're Twelve, you were a part of the group 'Rose Insurgents'. I believe you people had a habit of calling your weapons 'thorns'. I also remember you guys for being the most annoying people I've ever had to deal with, constantly poking at me with needles in my weakest points, and you wouldn't stop arguing over the stupidest things in the middle of our fight!"

I cringed a little, remembering what argument he was talking about. He continued, "I mean, seriously, who cares whether or not your demon OC needs to be gay for your friend, when you're in the middle of fighting one of the toughest bosses in the game?!" he complained.

"You don't want to know where that ended up leading after we left your place." I warned. He rolled his eyes, then moved a little closer to Syr. "Can I assume you're with this guy?" he asked, motioning towards him. I nodded, so he nodded a little in response. "Then the offer I'm about to make to him extends to you too."

He held his hand out over Syr, and a thick stream of pixels flew down from it, filling the empty spaces in Syr's body. A few seconds later, Syr was completely whole again, and he shifted in the bed slightly. In Syr's case, the recovery was unnecessary, but I don't think Syddium knew that. He took a couple steps back towards the door, and leaned against the wall beside it.

It took a few minutes for Syr to finally wake up, sitting up as he did so. His eyes widened a little when he saw me. "I leave you alone for a little while, and you almost get yourself killed already?" I asked. I could tell by the look on his face he was preparing an excuse.

I shook my head. "You really need me that desperately? I don't think I can afford to lose you after all the trouble we went through, so you're not leaving my sight again for a while until I know I can trust you not to die." I then pointed towards the door,informing Syr he had a visitor. Syddium gave a small wave as Syr looked his way.

Syr jumped back and pressed himself against the wall. I wasn't entirely sure if he recognized Syddium, or if he was just overreacting to someone new being here. "Relax, I'm 99% certain he's not going to hurt you." I offered. It clearly did nothing to comfort him, as he awkwardly slid into the small gap between the bed and wall. Syddium rolled his eyes again, before taking a couple steps forward.

His eyes returned to the gold color from before, and his whole appearance began to change. He became notably taller, having to duck slightly to keep his head away from the ceiling. His hair grew down past his shoulders, becoming a shiny metallic silver color. His simple shirt and jeans became a faded black tailcoat, a cerulean sash, and leather pants with weapons strapped to the outer sides. His fingers grew longer, ending in sharpened points. A couple of long black tendrils, similar to the ones blocking the door, grew out of his shoulders, arcing up and hanging down his back.

He approached Syr, and held out his hand. "I'm not here to hurt you. I'm here to help. I'm one of your kind." he calmly announced. Syr hesitated a bit, then moved to take his hand.

It was then that he realized that he was stuck in the little hole.

I facepalmed hard as Syr continued to struggle. Syddium grabbed him and started pulling, trying to get him out. After several failed attempts at pulling him out, I ended up having to just remove the bed entirely. Syddium dusted himself off and straightened his coat. I remember he used do that before starting a monologue before his battle…

"Alright, I may need to cut this a little short, I can't hold this form for long here. I've gained a great deal of influence and power here in this world, and I've come here to offer you support and protection, in return for helping me with my plans for revenge against players, for destroying our world and slaughtering us." I could see Syr's eyes light up and new he was sold at the word 'revenge'.

"Count me in!" Syr shouted excitedly. Syddium looked surprised for a moment, then looked towards me.

"I'm with him." I agreed, pointing towards Syr. Syddium nodded a little, a tad surprised, then slowly reverted back to the way he looked when he arrived.

"I have to admit, I wasn't expecting you guys to accept so quickly, especially not you." he admitted, looking towards me. I shrugged. His eyes flashed white a couple times, and he took a step towards the door. "I need to leave now, there's much to be done right now. As for you guys, do your best to stay alive for now, I'll come visit soon. Here's a parting gift, to keep you safe until then." he added, holding his hand out in front of him.

In it was a silver and gold heart shaped locket. He looked directly towards Syr. "You left this in my arena, Overkill." Syr quickly took it, holding it close to his chest. "...And for you," he offered, turning to me, "I have something that might suit you well."

He reached into the dark substance blocking the door, and pulled out a familiar weapon. "You also left this in my arena, ditched it for the weapon you'd gotten from me. I've tampered with it some, but I'm certain you'll find it just as useful." he remarked, handing my old sword to me. It had certain holes along the blade at different angles, and the blade was shaped with strange edges in different places. The only difference from before I noticed was the gilding along the blade and around the hilt.

"Fancy" I observed, turning the blade over, inspecting it from all angles.

"I know right? I look great!" it replied.

Everyone froze, even Syddium. "I… ah, looks like my experimenting had some... side effects... er, well, can't be too bad, right?" Syddium mumbled quietly, then quickly turned and vanished into -and along with- the darkness that had been blocking the door. There was an awkward silence.

"So… What is it that he gave you?" I asked Syr.

He had already put a small chain on it and put it around his neck. "It's a gift from a friend of mine," he explained. "I thought I'd lost it when the VBCU started attacking. Apart from being something meaningful between us, it also does this." He waved his hand over it, and the locket popped open. Gears turned, and a music box melody began to play from within it. Syr smiled a little as it played, but quickly closed it, shaking his head a little. "And what about you and your… Talking sword?"

I shrugged, saying "It's never done this before, it was just another sword last I saw it."

The hilt rumbled in my hand a little. "How could you say that? You used to take me everywhere, even named me! Do you even remember it?" the blade whined.

I rolled my eyes. "Sure, whatever Anthem." I scoffed, immediately letting it vanish into my inventory. "If I knew my sword would be able to retain memories, I wouldn't have said half the things I did around it." I groaned.

Syr covered a grin. "What did you say around it?" he asked. I shook my head in a 'You don't even want to know' manner.

We left the dirt hut to go somewhere better to stay. Syr had told me that some way south of here there was a group of players he had been staying with. He had pointed to a mountain, poking out from behind the tree tops. It became much more obvious where we were headed after smoke started rising from that direction. I got a nice view on the way there, especially since I didn't have to worry about running. You know, because I guilt tripped Syr into carrying me there because of my leg. I only got hurt trying to help him, after all, so if he hadn't nearly gotten himself killed, I would be perfectly fine.

The smoke was worrying, though. It looked like a large fire was burning, which wasn't usually natural. When we broke through the tree line, I finally got a good look at what Syr had talked about, and what was on fire. On the side of a large mountain was a half-destroyed wooden structure, currently on fire, with several people rushing around with water buckets trying to put it out. We both rushed up the mountain's side to try and help. Without a word, they handed us more buckets, and we did our best to prevent the fire from spreading. It took a while, there never seemed to be enough buckets, and even at our fastest, the fire was faster. We prevented it from spreading inside the cavern, but the entire wooden wall was beyond salvaging, so it was left to burn the rest away. When all was said and done, everyone started to gather around in a cavern previously covered by the now destroyed structure, and we joined them.

"Alright everyone, lesson learned, from now on, no more open fires or lava decorations…" instructed the one near the center. "Is everyone okay? Let's do a headcount real quick…" she added, looking around trying to count everyone. She looked a little confused after the first count, as well as the second, and after the third count she realized there were more people than she remembered. "Alright, I see Steve, Alex, and Crimson, you guys go on and head back…"

"AND YOU!" she shouted suddenly, looking at Syr. The three she had sent off turned to look, and seemed surprised. The first girl immediately ran over to Syr, grabbing him by the shoulders. "OVERKILL, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?! WE WERE LOOKING ALL OVER FOR YOU!" she shouted. Then she grabbed him by the arm and ran into the back of the cavern with him. I would've gone after her, but I was feeling lazy and if anything happened I could probably take care of it quickly. Besides, Alex, Steve and Crimson approached the two of us who were left standing around. I could clearly tell which ones were Steve and Alex, by the default-skin look they had, so that meant the one in the red cloak was Crimson. Figures.

"Alright… Sorry about that guys. That guy Casey ran off with… he disappeared yesterday without saying anything to any of us, and Casey's been searching the surrounding area for a while to find him." Steve remarked. Crimson stepped forward, holding his arms out wide. "I know this isn't a great first impression, but welcome to… uh... we still haven't decided on a group name yet, so just welcome, I guess. It's great to see some new people and those who arrived just now to help, we weren't expecting to see more people so soon." he admitted. "Feel free to stay a while, we've made sure this cavern is well lit, and we can get some small temporary houses for you to stay in. Unfortunately, it might take a little while to get some proper repairs done to the frontal wall, our first priority is to get a safe place for you guys to stay, we really don't want anyone dying here. We'd greatly appreciate any help if you can give it… Oh, right, go ahead and introduce yourselves, there's no need to be strangers." he added, returning to hiding the rest of his body under his cloak.

I looked towards the other guy with me. He had messy brown hair, rich turquoise eyes, and was surprisingly tall, possibly seven feet. He was darker than most of the rest of us, like he'd actually seen the sun before. Older too, 18 or 19 by my guess. He was covered in iron armor, with a golden chestplate. The bag on his hip seemed bigger than other people's.

He started talking, "I saw the fire and came over to see what happened. I'll help you guys if I can, wouldn't want anyone getting hurt. Beats staying by myself, too. I'm Butter, Butterhunter. I like mining, if you ever need supplies from down below." he added, and slung an iron pickaxe over his shoulder.

Then his bag started to move, rustling a little. It was VERY noticeable, and people started staring at it. Butter seemed oblivious until a sliding of fabric came from the bag.

The flap opened and a small slime poked out from inside, hopping out and into Butter's arm. Alex's eyes widened and she backed away, as everyone else drew weapons. Butter slightly paled, and held up his other arm defensively. "C-calm down, she's not going to hurt anyone!" he defended. The others hesitated a little, and Butter continued. "This is my… friend, Susie. She's kept me company since I arrived here."

I saw a couple confused looks between Steve and Crimson as they put their weapons away, and Alex kept hiding behind Steve. The little slime, Susie, seemed to be staring at Alex rather curiously, which really wasn't helping the situation. Butter held her in his hands, seemed to quietly make scolding motions, and then gently placed Susie back in his bag and closed the flap. He shook his head, seeming disappointed.

Steve, Crimson, and eventually Alex introduced themselves with names only, and Crimson led Butter deeper into the cavern, with Alex following behind.

Steve watched the others go in, then turned to me and rolled his eyes. "Crimson always forgets things, even if they are right in front of him." he mumbled, patting my shoulder a couple times. "So, tell me about yourself a little. We're going to let you in anyway, just want to know who we have around." he gave a friendly smile as he said that.

"I'm 'TwelveStepsBack', I came with Overkill." I replied. Steve sighed, his smile fading, and took a quick glance towards the back of the cavern, then motioned for me to head inside.

"Welcome to Haven, stay safe." he welcomed as I walked further into the cavern. Judging by the size of it, most of the mountain consisted of this cavity. There were quite a few wood and dirt huts, as well as some small buildings scattered around inside, many of which were clustered around the area farthest from the entrance. The largest building was circular shaped, and built mostly out of cobblestone and stone brick. It looked either too big to be someone's house, or the house of someone who had more materials than other people here. Regardless of which it was, the building caught my interest and I wanted to visit it first.

The building didn't have a door, only a large square hole in the wall. The inside was almost as bland as the outside, mostly cobble and stone bricks. There were plenty of chests lining the walls, which seemed promising. When I took a look inside them, however, I realized most of them were empty, apart from an abundance of cobblestone, and a rare ingot of iron here and there. Maybe this was just a dump room?

There was a staircase leading down a floor, from which a few voices echoed out of. Naturally, curiosity led me down there, and I found most of the other people sitting around a large table that took up half the room. They all looked towards me when I came down the stairs, and then a couple glared at Crimson. The one I assumed is Casey immediately began to berate him about leaving someone behind. There were many empty seats, so I took the one next to Syr, who was staring at the wall behind Casey. When Casey was done scolding Crimson, she spun around and threw a redstone torch on to the wall, and numerous faded red marks lining all the walls that had otherwise been unnoticeable suddenly lit up. Words and pictures dimly shone all around us, but were difficult to make sense of. Thankfully Casey was kind enough to explain.

"Alright so let me restart for our… Forgotten member." she informed, glaring briefly in Crimson's direction. She pointed to a nearly illegible scribble behind her. "Here are our plans so far," she explained, leaning against the table. "Steve, Crimson, Alex and I have talked about it some, and we've realized we might be here awhile before we can get out of here. We'll have to first locate whoever brought us here, which can take weeks, months, maybe a year. It's not like they're just hanging around nearby." she explained.

Syr looked around nervously. I think I was the only one who noticed, but I can't be sure.

Casey certainly didn't, as she kept going. "So, keeping that in mind, we're hoping to build a town, or at least a place to stay. It will act as a central hub from which we can safely stay at, and work together to track down and eliminate whoever is responsible for this." she looked around, then pointed to a few drawings. "First thing we need to do is make sure this place is safe. We were almost done with this step, until that fire proved that wood wouldn't do. We're going to build a stone wall over the entrance to the cavern, and build an easy way to climb and defend the path up the mountain. It will be hard to bring in new people if they have nothing to gain from joining us..."

She started tracing her finger along the drawings. "We need to make sure the cavern is well lit everywhere, and then we can move on to the second part. We need places for people to stay, everyone like a little private space they can call their own, so we need to get some houses or rooms for people to stay. After that, we need to get a stable source of food. I recommend we try growing wheat for bread, since we can find seeds almost anywhere. We'll need to produce plenty extra, since as this place grow, more people will need it. Then we get to move on to the fun part!"

She suddenly threw down another redstone torch, and we all jumped as the walls were pulled back by large pistons. Behind them was a large room full of several objects. Casey motioned for us to follow her as she ran into it. I saw Crimson shake his head and mutter, "So this is what she was doing down here." as we all got up and entered the room. There were a few buildings, mostly hollow, and a lot of cobblestone everywhere.

Casey walked up to a cobblestone tower, maybe two or three floors high. "After we've established a primary base, we can begin expanding." she explained.

Immediately after finishing her sentence, she took off in another direction, stopping at what looked like a big wooden message board. "Which brings me to this. This is a sort of like a "mission board" where we'll put any jobs we need to get done, but can't or shouldn't do ourselves. Of course there will be rewards for taking them, to encourage people we have to help out. For the most part, I just planned to put up scouting and construction jobs, but if any of you need to get something done, just take a piece of paper, write down what you need with like, a piece of coal, and then pin it up here with an arrow." She looked up at the board for a moment, then back at us. "If you have a better way to do it, go ahead and do that. And feel free to tell me too, I really would like to know so I don't keep using coal" she added as a forethought. She finished up her presentation with a little 'go team' nonsense and sent as all away. I had meant to intercept Syr on his way out, but I noticed he'd already taken off somewhere with Alex, as they disappeared out through the entrance to the cavern. Butter left towards a cave system's opening in the cavern, and Crimson and Steve managed to escape my sight somewhere. Seeing how I wasn't really needed, and didn't even want to be here, I quietly disappeared to resume my work. I needed to make sure people were sent anywhere but their direction, to help keep Syr hidden and safe.

I took off through the forest again, weaving through the tightly clustered trees. Just past the forest is a jungle, where I've set up a shelter for myself high up in the treetops. Even farther, beyond the jungle was a plain, then another forest, in which players had already built a town called Exodus, where I've been sending people. Many rooftops poked out through the tops of the trees, and I knew from my last visit that there were many more that didn't. I spent the rest of the day taking a stop at my hideout and travelling to Exodus. I took extra time carefully climbing on to the roof of one building, trying to not get spotted, then dropped in through a hole I'd made previously, covering it up quickly as I entered. The building was where most of the planning was done, sort of like Casey's redstone room, but much less… Exciting. There was a chest with book-and-quills, which people wrote down plans and ideas on. I noticed there was a large newly added map on the wall that hadn't been there last time. It was a big cluster of maps put together on the wall, taking up most of it. I noticed several markings on it. The location of Exodus, a marking on my hideout -meaning I'd need to move for the fifth time now-, one on a castle far away that required six map extensions to the left to see, another on a smaller town to the right, and a final one on the mountain I'd just come from. I quickly scraped together a few dyes and altered the map to remove the marker and make it appear that there wasn't a mountain there. Chances are they wouldn't forget it, but I figured it might help.

I made my hole in the ceiling, jumping up to grab the ledge of the roof and pull myself up, then filled the hole again. If I was being honest, I felt like a ninja, and was loving it. I took a seat atop the tallest building in Exodus, looking down over it, which further added to my ninja mindset. It was somewhat peaceful here, people wandering about here and there, a few guards with bows stayed at the fences around the town to keep monsters away.

The sight of a confused little child wandering about broke my whole mood, though. She seemed lost and scared, and really had to be too young for any of this… A pang of guilt stabbed me through, as I thought about the fact that I caused this…

…

It was short lived though, as I heard a sudden footstep behind me. I quickly spun around, pulling a sword out of my inventory. Syddium put his hands up defensively. He gave me a strange look, something like a confused smile. I hesitated a little, before putting my sword away again. He walked up to the ledge beside me, looking over the town. His look was different from mine, like he was studying it.

"What's this?" he asked suddenly. Something about his tone…

I hesitated again, and responded, "This is a player town, they call it Exodus." slowly and carefully. He kept looking over it, then turned to me.

"Do you have any particular attachment to it?" he continued. I really didn't like where this was going. I don't know what got into me, though, but I quickly replied with a simple 'no'. His eyes flashed a couple times, and within seconds I started hearing shouts from the edge of the town. Syddium's next words echoed in my head, "And this is how it begins…"

I knew it was coming, but it still surprised me when I heard the explosions, blasting away the wooden fences. My mind immediately jumped to the little girl I saw earlier, and before I even knew what I was doing, I was at the bottom of the building, stumbling across the ground with almost no health from the four story jump I'd just made. My legs had just finished healing, too... I quickly swept the girl up in my arms, holding her against me so she wouldn't see and ran towards the edge of town.

It was difficult, there were explosions everywhere and I was becoming highly disoriented. Arrows whizzed by, and rotten arms reached for the girl in my arms. Twice I almost lost her to a lunging spider. I tore another sword from my inventory, shouting "Sing, Anthem!" as I swiped it at the horde behind me. The blade shouted something I couldn't hear, and flew around on its own, hacking and slashing at anything that approached me. If my head hadn't been pounding as I fled, I might've heard a song playing as Anthem swung through the air. There were only a few things I could remember about that. I remember the girl tightly clinging to me as I ran, the groans and hissing of the occasional monster that I passed, the echoes of shouts and screams as I fled, and then the sickening silence that eventually followed.

That pang of guilt returned in full force, as the words 'It's all my fault' echoed throughout my thoughts. I never stopped running until I couldn't anymore, pain and hunger forcing me to collapse in the forest between Casey's mountain and the jungle. But it wasn't enough to stop me as I quickly whipped out an axe, hobbling over to nearby trees and hacking them down. I built a shelter, this time with much more care, in the clearing I created. When I couldn't lift the blocks to build anymore, I pulled a pick from my inventory and dug another two floors below the small building, and did my best to furnish them some. By the time I had finished, the leaves from the trees I cut had disappeared, leaving some apples behind. I had devoured half of them, at least four or five, before I considered that the girl with me might need some, which she did. I took her downstairs, made her a promise I probably couldn't keep, shut all the heavy iron doors behind me, then finally collapsed fully into a bed, letting the world fade away like a horrible nightmare.

* * *

 **A great many thanks to awesome friend and fellow author Butterhunter for more than a reasonable amount of help with writing this, including but not limited to: Grammar, Ideas, Motivation... Not that I expect many people to still be here to see this, but feel free to check out his stuff as well, which there's plenty to see! (Actual penname: "Authorian - ButterHunter").**


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